n 2000, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) carried out a secret mission to bury, skew, and manipulate data in six vaccine safety studies, in a coordinated effort to control the message that “vaccines do not cause autism.” They did so via secret meetings and backtesting health-care data. The CDC invested tens of millions of dollars in a foreign health-care data analytics startup run by Danish scientist Poul Thorsen, a move to ensure that no link ever surfaced. But fate had other ideas. The agency soon learned it couldn’t control Thorsen. In 2011, the US Justice Department indicted him for the theft of more than $1 million of CDC grant money.