Dan Olmsted was a journalist and former senior editor for United Press International, 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. 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. 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.
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".
