Oregon Medical Board Suspends Dr. Paul Thomas for Practicing Informed Consent

This article was revised and published as a book titled The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board, featuring a Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

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Introduction

On December 3, 2020, the Oregon Medical Board issued an emergency suspension order to prevent renowned pediatrician Paul Thomas, MD, from seeing his patients by stripping him of his license.

The ostensible reason given by the board for this action against Thomas, who is affectionately known as “Dr. Paul” by his patients and peers, is that his “continued practice constitutes an immediate danger to public health”.

Thomas is perhaps most well known as coauthor, along with Dr. Jennifer Margulis, of the book The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, which provides guidance to parents who want to protect their children from infectious diseases but have concerns about vaccines. The book is a bestseller currently showing a five-star rating from over 1,800 customer reviews at Amazon.com.

Since 2008, Thomas has practiced pediatrics out of his clinic, Integrative Pediatrics, which is in Beaverton, Oregon, within the metropolitan area of Portland.

The main accusation leveled at Thomas by the state medical board is that he has “breached the standard of care” in his practice by having many patients who are not vaccinated strictly according to the routine childhood schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The story the medical board tells is one of a reckless and “bullying” doctor who coerces his pediatric patients’ parents not to follow the CDC’s recommendations and whose gross negligence in this regard has caused harm to children and negatively impacted the health of the community.[1]

But that’s not the true story.

The true story is that parents have flocked to Integrative Pediatrics precisely because they’ve been bullied, with the state’s approval, by pediatricians in other practices who choose to dutifully serve the bureaucrats in government by compelling parents to strictly comply with the CDC’s schedule.

Parents who did comply and then witnessed their children suffer harm as a result are mocked and derisively labeled “anti-vaxxers” for learning hard lessons from their firstborn children that they then apply to younger siblings by making different parenting choices. (Often, such parents respond to the derogatory label by insisting on being described as “ex-vaxxers”, but government officials and the major media institutions refuse to hear them.)

Parents who do vaccinate their children, but not strictly according to the CDC’s schedule, are also lumped into the group monolithically labeled “the anti-vaccine movement” by apologists for the one-size-fits-all approach of public vaccine policy.

These parents have all been told a million times that vaccines are “safe and effective”. They are well aware of the arguments in favor of vaccinations that we all hear incessantly from government officials, medical professionals, and the mainstream media.

They are also perfectly familiar with the tale of how, in 1998, public enemy number one, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, published a fraudulent study in The Lancet, later retracted, claiming to have found an association between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.[2] These parents know that numerous studies have since been published that failed to find an association.

They know that, by choosing to dissent from or criticize public vaccine policy, they are placing a target on their back. They know they will be met with disapproval by other members of their own family, accused of being irresponsible parents, scolded, and scorned. They know that they will be viciously attacked by government officials and policy advocates masquerading as journalists, as well as by doctors and other members of their community.[3]

And yet, despite the bullying and intimidation, they remain unmoved. There is one simple reason for this: they see it as their duty as responsible parents to act in their children’s best interest no matter what societal pressures are placed on them to conform with expected behavior. Consequently, they do their own research, think for themselves, draw their own conclusions, and take a stand to protect their children.

In many cases in Portland, parents who face the scornful intimidation of a routine well-child visit at their pediatrician’s office and still insist on exercising their right to make an informed choice not to vaccinate are told that they must either comply with the CDC’s recommendations or find another pediatrician.[4]

And, so, they go to Dr. Paul.

With respect to the medical board’s suspension order, Paul Thomas says that he knew the moment The Vaccine-Friendly Plan was published that this day was coming. He knew at the time that, because he was challenging the CDC’s schedule and therefore the “standard of care” of the medical establishment, he would be placing a target on his back and risking his career.

But he did it anyway.

Why?

The Oregon Medical Board wants us to believe it’s because he’s a villain who demonstrates reckless disregard and poses a danger to public health. The media have run with that story.

However, what neither the board’s order nor the media have disclosed is that the board’s suspension order was issued just eleven days after Thomas published a study in a peer-reviewed medical journal showing that, among the children born into his practice, those who remained completely unvaccinated were diagnosed at significantly lower rates than vaccinated children for a broad range of chronic health conditions and developmental disorders.

The difference in health outcomes was even more dramatic when Thomas and his coauthor, research scientist Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, looked at cumulative incidence of office visits for given diagnoses rather than incidence of diagnoses alone. This result strongly suggests that his vaccinated patients not only suffer from a higher rate of chronic health conditions, but also that their conditions are more severe, therefore requiring more frequent visits to his clinic.

The study is titled “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination”. It was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health on November 22, 2020.

As Thomas and Lyons-Weiler emphasize in the study, they do not show that vaccinations are the cause of the evidently worse health outcomes among vaccinated children. But what the results of the study do demonstrate to a reasonable degree of certainty is that his unvaccinated patients are healthier than vaccinated children and place less of a burden on the health care system.[5]

Importantly, this was data that the medical board had asked Thomas to produce to support his practice of vaccinating patients according to the principles of his “Vaccine-Friendly Plan”.

Yet, when Thomas surmounted this challenge by obtaining Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval and publishing the deidentified data comparing health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children, the board’s emergent response was to suspend his license until further notice “while this case remains under investigation”—and on grounds that are completely belied by the publicly available evidence.[6]

The real story here isn’t one of a rogue doctor dismissing science and recklessly endangering his pediatric patients by bullying their parents into accepting “alternative” care. The real story is one of a rogue medical board dismissing science and recklessly endangering public health by encouraging pediatricians to bully their parents into strict compliance with the CDC’s schedule and selecting Paul Thomas, MD, to set an example to other physicians of what their punishment will be if they instead choose to respect parents’ right to informed consent.

But that story doesn’t begin in December of 2020. To tell the true story and fully appreciate its significance, we need to go back and review the sequence of events that led Paul Thomas to this pivotal moment in his life’s journey.