Persecuted, or disciplined? What the boards actually found
Two physicians sit at the head of the racketeering complaint against American paediatricians, offered as living proof that doctors who dissent are professionally destroyed. Children's Health Defense published a book making that case about one of them, with a foreword by the man who is now United States Health Secretary. The regulators' own orders describe something else: a child with tetanus treated with colloidal silver, a febrile infant worked up below the standard of care, ninety children knowingly left without a second MMR dose, and ten medical exemptions written for children the doctor never examined.
What this page claims, and what it does not
Everything below about Dr. Paul Thomas comes from the Oregon Medical Board's Order of Emergency Suspension of 4 December 2020, which we have read in full. Everything about Dr. Kenneth Stoller comes from the Medical Board of California's decision revoking his licence in February 2021 and from published accounts of it.
Two fairness points. The Oregon order was an emergency interim order, made without a hearing, and Dr. Thomas had the right to contest it. He did not ultimately do so: he surrendered his Oregon licence in 2022 in the face of a finding of repeated and gross negligence, neither admitting nor denying it. Dr. Stoller's revocation was a final decision after a hearing; he sought a stay and a judge refused it.
Both men dispute the characterisation of what happened to them. Their account is set out at length in a book and in litigation, and readers can consult it. This page sets their account beside the regulators' orders and invites the comparison.
Why these two men carry the lawsuit
In January 2026 Children's Health Defense sued the American Academy of Pediatrics under the federal racketeering statute. That case is examined separately here. What matters for this page is a single sentence of it.
At ¶ 8 the complaint asserts that the AAP's 67,000 members deliver the alleged enterprise's safety claims as their own medical advice, and that physicians who deviate face professional destruction — “as Plaintiffs Paul Thomas, M.D. and Kenneth P. Stoller, M.D. experienced.” At ¶ 14 their licences are described as revoked or suspended for conducting research contradicting the AAP's safety claims, or for issuing individualised exemptions based on clinical judgment.
That claim is load-bearing. Remove it and the two physician plaintiffs have no injury to sue about. It is also precisely where the AAP aims: its memorandum argues their injuries flow from independent decisions by state medical boards, not from anything the AAP did, and notes that one of them surrendered his licence voluntarily.
So the question is a factual one, and it is answerable, because both regulators published what they found.
Oregon: what the Board actually wrote about Paul Thomas
On 4 December 2020 the Oregon Medical Board suspended the licence of Paul Norman Thomas, MD, licence MD15689, effective the previous evening, under ORS 677.205(3) — the provision allowing suspension without a hearing where continued practice presents an immediate danger. The order is signed by the Board Chair, Kathleen Harder, MD.
It is seven pages long and it is almost entirely about the care of individual children.
The order also records how he spoke to parents. One mother sought care elsewhere after being, in the Board's quotation, reduced to tears
by his bullying
her into his personal vaccine schedule against her express wish for full vaccination. Another asked for polio and rotavirus vaccines on the CDC schedule; the clinic did not stock them, and the Board records that he asked whether the family was travelling to Africa, repeatedly connected vaccines with autism, and asked the mother how awful she would feel if her child developed autism and she could have prevented it.
The ninety, from his own spreadsheet
The most serious finding in the order did not come from a complaint. It came from a document Dr. Thomas gave the Board himself.
He provided a spreadsheet of his own study of antibody responses to MMR vaccine — titres taken from 905 patients between February 2002 and July 2015. The Board found the testing itself unjustified, since outside rare suspected immune deficiency there is no clinical indication for checking titres.
Then it read the data. 122 patients in his own sheet had an inadequate response to the mumps component. Thirty-two received the appropriate second dose. The remaining ninety received no additional vaccination at all.
The Board described knowingly leaving those children inadequately protected as ninety acts of gross and repeated negligence. He had the test results. He knew which children were unprotected. The evidence that he did nothing about it is a file he handed over.
The Board's own framing of the schedule claim is worth quoting because of the word it chose: it found he fraudulently asserts
that following his vaccine schedule will prevent or decrease the incidence of autism, and uses that claim to solicit parental refusal of full vaccination.
California: what the Board actually wrote about Kenneth Stoller
The Stoller record is longer and, if anything, plainer. It runs to a full contested hearing.
The Executive Director of the Medical Board of California filed an accusation on 29 July 2019 against Kenneth Paul Stoller, MD, Physician's and Surgeon's Certificate A 41183, held since 1984. Administrative Law Judge Juliet E. Cox heard the matter over four days in September 2020. The record closed on 9 November 2020 and she issued her proposed decision on 4 December. The Board adopted it on 16 February 2021, effective 5:00 p.m. on 18 March 2021.
Dr. Stoller was represented at that hearing by Richard Jaffe. Hold that thought.
Three facts from the findings frame everything else. He was board-certified in paediatrics from 1989 to 2011 and did not renew. Since 2005 he has been medical director at hyperbaric oxygen clinics, and when he saw the ten children at issue he was in a San Francisco practice alongside several chiropractors and naturopaths, treating more adults than children. And on the subjects his exemptions turned upon — infectious disease, human genetics, immunology — the judge found he had studied the literature but had no formal postgraduate training in any of them.
The ten children
The exemptions were written between 2016 and 2018, after California removed the personal-belief exemption and left a medical one as the only route.
- Patient 1 was a four-month-old boy with a congenital heart defect, vomiting, shortness of breath and poor weight gain. The judge found Dr. Stoller documented no examination and recorded no vital signs. He tested two genes, concluded the child would likely be a “non-responder” to measles and hepatitis B vaccine, and issued an exemption that was global — every vaccine — and permanent.
- Patient 2, aged two and a half, had an examination within normal limits and an unremarkable history. She was exempted anyway, on the basis of a sibling's reported reaction.
- Patient 3, that sibling, was described in the records as having had a “near SIDS” and “acute encephalitic” event. Dr. Stoller did not obtain the child's paediatric records and did not investigate. Genetic testing he planned was not documented and apparently never done.
- Patients 5 and 6, siblings aged six and twelve, were assessed after a telephone interview with their father — his
custom and practice
. The parents were instructed to purchase a 23andMe consumer ancestry kit, and he interpreted the raw data himself. Both received permanent exemptions from all vaccines. - Patient 7's permanent exemption rested partly on “a cousin with documented AEFI.” No medical documentation about the cousin was in the chart.
- Patient 9's mother telephoned to say she needed an exemption within ten days or
she can't go to school.
A temporary exemption issued, then a permanent global one. - Patient 10's mother complained that the school nurse
sees it as her job to protect the community from unvaccinated children.
Same at-home genetic test, same permanent exemption from everything.
The finding that answers the complaint
The racketeering complaint describes Dr. Stoller as disciplined for issuing individualised medical exemptions based on clinical judgment rather than AAP-endorsed criteria.
Legal Conclusion 9 of the decision finds that he undertook no good-faith prior examination of any of the ten children; that the very purpose of the exemptions was to delay or discourage vaccination; that no medical reasons existed for those children not to be vaccinated; and that avoiding vaccination raised their own and their communities' susceptibility to infectious disease while offering them no potential personal benefit whatever.
Clinical judgment requires a clinical encounter. The judge found there was none.
California protects minority medical opinion — and he still failed
This is the part most worth a Canadian reader's attention, because it disposes of the persecution argument on the movement's own preferred ground.
Section 2234.1 of California's Business and Professions Code expressly permits a physician to rely on alternative rather than conventional treatments and theories. A doctor does not act unprofessionally merely by holding views shared with a minority of practitioners. The statute exists precisely to stop boards disciplining dissent.
The judge applied it, and found he fell outside it — not because his opinions were unorthodox, but because the protection is conditional: it requires informed consent and a good-faith prior examination of the patient, and it forbids advice that delays or discourages traditional diagnosis, and it requires a reasonable potential for therapeutic gain. He failed on each.
He was not disciplined for believing something unusual. He was disciplined for not examining children.
What the judge said he was actually selling
Legal Conclusion 10 records that many of these parents came to him specifically seeking exemptions, not seeking medical advice with a basis in science — and that in exchange for $400 to $600 per child, respondent sold these parents (and many others) the exemptions they sought.
Legal Conclusion 11 states the Board's duty as protecting the public against negligent practice and against physicians who abuse their licensure by exploiting medical ignorance or parental caution for financial gain.
Legal Conclusion 12 found the exemptions undermined public health and welfare, and that the record demonstrated both his contempt for medical science
and his unsuitability for probation
. Public safety, the judge concluded, required revocation rather than any lesser sanction.
In fairness: one charge was not made out
The accusation carried four causes for discipline. Three were established. The fourth — inadequate and inaccurate record-keeping — was not. At Legal Conclusion 6 the judge held that the complainant had not established cause for discipline on that ground.
We record this for two reasons. It is true, and it corrects an earlier version of this page, which said his record-keeping was found inadequate on the strength of secondary reporting. It is also the answer to anyone claiming these hearings are a formality: the Board brought four charges to a contested hearing before an independent administrative law judge, and lost one of them.
The same lawyer, a third time
Dr. Stoller was represented before the Medical Board of California by Richard Jaffe.
Richard Jaffe is the sole signatory on the racketeering complaint filed in January 2026, in which Dr. Stoller is a plaintiff and his revocation is pleaded as a RICO injury. Richard Jaffe is also, as of 20 October 2026, a member of the defence team representing Andrea Shaw — the complaint's lead plaintiff — against two counts of first-degree murder in Idaho, where the State has filed notice that it will seek the death penalty.
So the lawyer who defended the licence pleads its loss as racketeering, and now appears in the capital case arising from the same two deaths the civil complaint attributes to vaccines. That is not an allegation about anyone. It is three appearances on three records.
The book, and who wrote its foreword
In 2021 a book appeared: The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board, by Jeremy R. Hammond, published by Skyhorse in the Children's Health Defense series.
The foreword is by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is credited as an author on the cover.
Read the sequence
Children's Health Defense publishes a book arguing that Paul Thomas was persecuted rather than disciplined. Its then-chairman writes the foreword. Four years later the same organisation files a federal racketeering suit whose theory requires Paul Thomas to have been persecuted rather than disciplined, and names him as a plaintiff.
The organisation is offering a court, as evidence of a nationwide fraud, a narrative it published itself and its chairman endorsed in print. That chairman is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States.
There is a further step. In February 2025, during Kennedy's confirmation hearings, a letter supporting his nomination was entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Ron Johnson. It was organised by MAHA Action, run by Del Bigtree, and carried roughly 800 signatures. The Associated Press found that at least ten signatories had faced medical board action. Paul Thomas was among the named signers. Asked whether it had verified any signatory's credentials, MAHA Action did not answer.
Senator Johnson received Children's Health Defense's 2026 Defender Award at the conference documented on our running file, nineteen months later.
What this machinery actually does
Set out in order, the sequence is the same each time.
A regulator investigates the care of named children and makes findings. An advocacy organisation republishes those findings as persecution, in a book, a film or a fundraising appeal. The physician becomes a figure of principle rather than a subject of discipline. That reputation is then offered back to a court, or a legislature, or a confirmation hearing, as evidence that the regulator is corrupt — which is the claim the discipline was supposed to have answered.
Nothing in that chain requires the original findings to be wrong. It only requires that nobody read them. They are published, free, and in Thomas's case seven pages long.
The question that cuts through it
When someone tells you a doctor was struck off for dissenting, ask one thing: what did the order actually say?
Not what the appeal said, not what the book said, not what the organisation raising money off it said. The order. Regulators publish them, and they are written in plain language about particular patients on particular dates. In the two cases on this page the orders describe a child with tetanus, an infant with fever, twins with rotavirus, ninety children left without a second dose, and ten exemptions sold to families whose children had never been examined.
None of that is a disagreement about vaccine policy. All of it is about the care of individual children, which is the only thing a medical board has jurisdiction over.
Why this belongs on a Canadian site
Because the standing complaint of this site is that Canadian colleges act too slowly against registrants spreading medical misinformation — and this is what the counter-industry looks like when a regulator finally does act.
The Canadian version is already running. The pattern documented in the Mandate Cases section follows the same shape: a regulator acts, litigation follows, the registrant is reframed as a casualty of institutional capture, and the fundraising begins. Canadians have been asked to pay into more than one action built on that narrative.
The useful import is not the American facts. It is the method of checking them. A Canadian reader who encounters a persecuted-physician story can do here exactly what this page does: find the college's published decision and read what it says about patients.
A note on how this page is written
Patients are identified by the letters the Oregon Board used, not by name. The findings are the Board's, quoted or closely paraphrased, and the few direct quotations are short and marked. The Oregon order was an emergency interim order and is described as one; Dr. Thomas's subsequent surrender of his licence in 2022, without admitting or denying the findings, is stated. Dr. Stoller's revocation followed a hearing and is described as final.
Neither physician is said here to have intended harm, and no view is offered on their sincerity. The question this page asks is narrower and entirely documentary: whether the conduct the regulators described is the conduct the racketeering complaint describes. Readers can compare the two for themselves; both are public.
Dr. Thomas and Dr. Stoller are welcome to respond. Corrections will be posted.
Sources. On Dr. Thomas: Oregon Medical Board, In the Matter of Paul Norman Thomas, MD, Licence No. MD15689 — Order of Emergency Suspension, 4 December 2020, read in full; all findings, patient designations and quoted phrases are from that order. His 2022 surrender of the licence, neither admitting nor denying the Board's finding of repeated and gross negligence, is as reported by the Associated Press, 2 February 2025. On Dr. Stoller: the Medical Board of California's decision revoking his licence, 16 February 2021, as reported and analysed by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Skeptical Raptor, 21 February 2021; the subsequent refusal of a stay by Judge James P. Arguelles, Sacramento County Superior Court, March 2021; and the disciplinary record compiled by Quackwatch. On the complaint: Shaw v. American Academy of Pediatrics, No. 1:26-cv-00171-TJK (D.D.C.), Document 1, ¶¶ 8 and 14, and the AAP's Memorandum in Support of its Motion to Dismiss, Document 8-1. On the book: Jeremy R. Hammond, The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board, foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Skyhorse / Children's Health Defense, 2021. On the Senate letter: Associated Press, 2 February 2025, on the MAHA Action letter entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Ron Johnson.
QuackeryWatch is a non-commercial consumer information site operated by Terry Polevoy, MD, FRCPC, a retired paediatrician.