Paul D. Thacker

Thacker was raised in California and Texas, and joined the US Army after high school, where he was deployed in Saudi Arabia and Iraq during the Gulf War. He worked as a laboratory technician at Emory University before turning to journalism, leaving Emory for an Audubon magazine internship in 2000. == Career ==

After 2000, Thacker wrote for publications such as The New Republic and Salon and was a staff writer with Environmental Science & Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Here he published a series of exposés that a senior ACS official claimed showed an anti-industry bias, culminating in an article on the Weinberg Group that resulted in him being fired by the journal in 2006. In Thacker's Weinberg Group story he wrote about a letter that group sent to DuPont outlining a plan to protect DuPont from litigation and regulation over Teflon. The Weinberg Group had done similar work for Big Tobacco and then began working in Europe to defeat alcohol regulations. ACS editor Rudy Baum called the Weinberg article a "hatchet job". Later that year, Thacker's work was profiled on Exposé: America's Investigative Reports. In 2007, Thacker joined the United States Senate Committee on Finance for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, investigating medical research conflicts of interest. Among his work he identified several physicians who had failed to disclose payments from drug and medical companies, including psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff. He also led the committee's investigation of the drug Avandia, which included a report that a medical journal had published a ghostwritten article promoting the drug. He left the committee in 2010 to join the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog organization. From 2012 to 2014, Thacker completed two fellowships at Harvard University's Safra Center for Ethics. Thacker received the 2021 British Journalism Award for Specialist Journalism for a series of articles in The BMJ investigating undisclosed financial interests among medical experts advising the US and UK governments on vaccines. The award judges said "[t]his was expertly researched and written journalism on a subject of huge national importance." The Association of British Science Writers chose an article Thacker wrote on Pfizer as a finalist for the Steve Connor Award for Investigative Science Journalism. ==Controversies and False Claims==

In 2006, Thacker was fired from the journal Environmental Science & Technology for "anti-industry bias." The chief executive of the publishing arm of the American Psychiatric Association declared the claim to be "not true." In 2021, an interim protection order was filed and granted against Thacker by the District Court of Maryland for harassment of Stephen Neidenbach, a public school teacher who debunks anti-vaccine misinformation online. Thacker has also published conspiracy theories about others who document misinformation online, including Imran Ahmed (strategist), repeatedly claiming he is an "intelligence asset" for the British government based on unverified rumours. On May 18, 2023, Thacker falsely claimed that journalist Taylor Lorenz used family connections to remove content from the Internet Archive. == Anti-vaccine reporting ==

In November 2021, The BMJ published a piece by Thacker alleging there has been "poor practice" at Ventavia, one of the companies involved in the phase III evaluation trials of the Pfizer vaccine. The report was enthusiastically embraced by anti-vaccination activists. Questioning Thacker's work in Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski wrote that his article presented facts without necessary context to misleading effect, playing up the seriousness of the noted problems. Some experts have expressed skepticism over the allegations made in the report. Prominent vaccination expert Paul Offit has criticized the issues outlined in the report as being vague and has cautioned against assuming the claims made in it are true. In a 2023 article in Politico about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s history of endorsing conspiracy theories, Thacker is described as an "anti-vaccine reporter." Medical doctor David Gorski referred to Thacker as a "conspiracy-monger." Published on his blog, The Disinformation Chronicle, Thacker claimed that the Yale study showed that "long COVID patients may actually be vaccine injured." Iwasaki responded, "No. This is not what our study shows." Reuters also criticized Thacker's article, labeling it "misleading." For Bloomberg News, science columnist Faye Flam reported that pulmonologist Dr. Adam Gaffney of Harvard Medical School said that "the antivaccine community is ecstatic about this study because they think it validates their favorite pseudoscientific theory" regarding Long COVID. == Notes ==