Dan Olmsted

Dan Olmsted (died January 23, 2017) was a journalist and former senior editor for United Press International (UPI), a news agency of the Unification Church company News World Communications. Olmsted wrote a series of reports suggesting a link between vaccination and autism, a hypothesis which has been disproven. His columns on health and medicine appeared regularly in The Washington Times and were syndicated nationally from UPI's Washington D.C. bureau. He owned and edited the Age of Autism website, a site he described as the "Daily Web Newspaper of the Autism Epidemic", where writers question the safety of vaccines. Olmsted wrote an article in 2002, along with reporter Mark Benjamin, which drew links between the drug Lariam given to military personnel and mental health disorders in soldiers. In 2013, the FDA issued its most serious "boxed" warning for that drug, warning that Lariam's serious psychiatric side effects may be permanent for some.
He co-wrote four books with Mark Blaxill, co-founder of Age of Autism. The last, Denial: How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future was released posthumously in 2017.
The Age of Autism
From 2005 to July 2007, Olmsted wrote about his investigative findings concerning the apparent global epidemic of autism in a series of columns titled The Age of Autism. The articles were based upon his trip to a vaccine free Amish community in Lancaster County Pennsylvania with an extremely low autism rate. Though some scientific research suggests that autism is a primarily genetic disorder and that reported increases are mainly due to changes in diagnostic practices, Olmsted, claimed that the increases are due to mercury poisoning, particularly from vaccines, and that the genetics is mostly secondary. Though Olmsted continued to make this claim, thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative blamed by Olmsted, was removed from most vaccines as a precaution beginning in the late 1990s, with no effect on autism diagnosis rates.
Citing Olmsted's reports, on March 30, 2006, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY) announced that she would be drafting legislation calling for scientific studies investigating thiomersal and autism, additional to the many already conducted. The bill was introduced in the U. S. House of Representatives in April 2006. Maloney made the announcement at a National Press Club press conference in Washington, D.C., along with Olmsted and David Kirby.
Scientific studies have found no credible evidence that thimerosal-containing vaccines and the MMR vaccine cause autism, and the MMR vaccine controversy is largely seen as the result of an "elaborate fraud" by British researcher Andrew Wakefield.
In a critical assessment by the Columbia Journalism Review of the thimerosal controversy, Olmsted's reporting on unvaccinated populations has been characterized as "misguided" by two anonymous reporters. Both sources "believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions". In 2011 Brian Dunning listed the Age of Autism website as #2 on his "Top 10 Worst Anti-Science Websites" list.
Death
Olmsted died on January 23, 2017, from an overdose of prescription medication, according to his spouse Mark Milett.

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