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.
Oregon: what happened next, and how it ended
Everything above comes from the emergency suspension order of December 2020. That order is where most accounts of Paul Thomas stop, including ours until now. It is not where the matter ended, and one thing has to be corrected before anything else.
The emergency suspension was withdrawn
On 3 June 2021 the Oregon Medical Board issued a “Withdrawal of Order of Emergency Suspension for Reconsideration,” which in the Board’s own words “withdraws for reconsideration the Board’s December 4, 2020, Order of Emergency Suspension.”
The findings quoted above are still what that order said, and they are still a public document. But the order itself stood for six months and was then pulled back by the body that made it. Anyone citing the December 2020 suspension as Dr. Thomas’s current status — and a good deal of coverage on both sides still does — is citing something that was superseded five years ago.
Withdrawal was not abandonment. The Board had already filed a formal complaint six weeks earlier, it replaced the suspension the same day with binding interim restrictions, and it amended its complaint that November. What changed was the instrument, not the direction.
The Oregon Medical Board’s licence verification for MD15689, pulled on 22 October 2026 (verification ID 52582154-6d2c-4f92-b0d8-83f9a754199a), sets out the whole sequence.
| Effective | Order type | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Dec 2020 | Order of Emergency Suspension | Voted at 5:15 p.m. on 3 December 2020 to suspend immediately, “due to the Board’s concern for the safety and welfare of Licensee’s current and future patients.” Ended 3 Jun 2021. |
| 22 Apr 2021 | Complaint and Notice of Proposed Disciplinary Action | Formal allegations under the Medical Practice Act. |
| 3 Jun 2021 | Other Order | Withdrawal of the emergency suspension for reconsideration. |
| 3 Jun 2021 | Interim Stipulated Order | He agreed “to voluntarily limit his practice to acute care; refrain from engaging in consultations or directing clinic staff with respect to vaccination protocols questions, issues or recommendations; and refrain from performing any research involving patient care” pending the investigation. Ended 6 Oct 2022. |
| 22 Nov 2021 | Amended Complaint and Notice | Amended allegations. Ended 6 Oct 2022. |
| 6 Oct 2022 | Stipulated Order | Surrender of the licence, and an undertaking never to reapply. Still listed as open. |
He did not lose his licence. He gave it up, and agreed never to ask for it back
The Board’s register describes the final order in one passage, quoted here in full:
“On October 6, 2022, Licensee entered into a Stipulated Order with the Board for unprofessional or dishonorable conduct; making false or misleading statements regarding the efficacy of Licensee’s treatments; repeated and gross negligence in the practice of medicine; willfully violating a provision of ORS chapter 677; failing to comply with a Board request; and failing to report an adverse action. With this Order Licensee surrenders his Oregon medical license while under investigation, effective 60 days from the date of the Order, and agrees to never reapply for a license to practice medicine in Oregon.”
His current status on the Oregon register is one word: Surrendered, effective 5 December 2022. There is no practice location on file.
What a stipulated order is, and is not
A stipulated order is an agreement between the licensee and the Board, not a decision reached after a contested hearing. The grounds above are the Board’s description of what the order was entered into for; the surrender happened while under investigation, which is to say before those allegations were ever tested in the way Dr. Stoller’s were in California over four days.
That cuts both ways, and the page says so. Nothing here was proved against Dr. Thomas at a hearing. But he agreed to an order reciting those grounds, surrendered his licence rather than contest them, and undertook never to seek another in Oregon — which is a good deal more final than a suspension.
Where he trained
Unlike Dr. Stoller, whose medical school appears in no board record we have found, Dr. Thomas’s training is on the Oregon register in full:
- Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire — MD, 9 June 1985.
- Internship, Valley Medical Center, Fresno, California — June 1985 to June 1986.
- Residency in paediatrics, Valley Medical Center, Fresno — July 1986 to June 1987.
- Residency in paediatrics, UCSD Medical Center, San Diego — July 1987 to June 1988.
Oregon first licensed him on 15 July 1988. His specialty is recorded as “Addiction Medicine, Pediatrics” — under the Board’s own standing caveat that “specialty is self-reported by the licensee. It does not necessarily indicate specialty board certification.” As the American Board of Pediatrics record above shows, his paediatric certification had been revoked eighteen months before the surrender.
What the complaint says about this, and what the registers say
Paragraph 14 of Shaw v. American Academy of Pediatrics pleads that “Plaintiffs Thomas and Stoller are pediatricians whose licenses were revoked or suspended for conducting research contradicting AAP’s safety claims or issuing individualized medical exemptions based on clinical judgment rather than AAP-endorsed criteria.”
On the public registers: Dr. Stoller’s California licence was revoked and upheld on appeal, and his New Mexico licence was revoked on a 5–2 vote. Dr. Thomas’s Oregon licence was surrendered by his own agreement, with an undertaking never to reapply, and the suspension that preceded it had been withdrawn sixteen months earlier.
“Revoked or suspended” does not describe what happened to Paul Thomas. He was not suspended when he stopped practising in Oregon, and nothing was revoked. He signed.
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. He appealed, and the California courts upheld the Board’s decision — a fact recorded at paragraph 99 of the New Mexico proceedings described below.
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 and let the certificate lapse at the end of 2010 — the registrar’s own record is set out below. 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.
What the American Board of Pediatrics says
The decision records the certification loosely, and his own website repeats it the same way. The certifying body itself is more precise. The American Board of Pediatrics publishes a verification database that the Joint Commission and the National Committee for Quality Assurance rely on, drawn from its certification records and updated each business day. This is what it holds:
| Name | Stoller, Kenneth Paul — ABP ID #209707 |
| Certification area | General Pediatrics |
| Certificate number | 41497 |
| Certificate period | 2 June 1989 – 31 December 2010 |
| Current status | No Longer Certified |
| Actively maintaining certification | No |
| Address on file | Santa Fe, New Mexico |
So the certification was real and it was substantial: twenty-one years and seven months of board certification in general paediatrics, from the body that has certified American paediatricians since 1933. Nothing about it was nominal or bought from an unaccredited board.
Lapsed is not revoked, and the difference matters
The ABP's status for him is “No Longer Certified,” which it defines as: “The physician is not currently certified and is not meeting requirements for certification. Their certification might have expired or lapsed, or the individual might be on a leave of absence.”
That is a different entry from “Revoked, No Longer Certified,” which the ABP reserves for a physician “not currently certified due to a violation of the ABP policies.” He does not carry that status. The American Board of Pediatrics did not take his certification away. He stopped maintaining it, and it expired.
This page says so plainly because it is exactly the distinction that gets blurred when a disciplinary record is summarised by someone in a hurry. California revoked his licence. The ABP did not revoke anything.
Two details in the Board's own fine print sharpen it, though.
The first is why he stopped. Finding 5 of the California decision records that he “did not seek to renew his board certification in 2011, and testified that he did not because the practice shift described below in Finding 7 had made board certification less valuable to him.” Finding 7 is the move into hyperbaric oxygen. On his own evidence, the credential was dropped because the business had changed, not because of any dispute about vaccines, and a full decade before California acted.
The second is that he was not grandfathered. The ABP exempts from continuing certification only those “physicians certified prior to May 1988… because this requirement was not in place when they were first certified.” He was certified on 2 June 1989, thirteen months inside the cohort that was required to keep it up. The lapse was not a quirk of when he qualified.
A one-year discrepancy, resolved
His own website gives the period as “active 1989-2011,” and the California decision says “between 1989 and 2011.” The ABP's record ends the certificate on 31 December 2010. The two reconcile — 2011 is the year in which the renewal was not sought, which is precisely what Finding 5 describes — but where they differ, this page uses the registrar's dates.
The body that certified him is named in his own lawsuit as a racketeer
Paragraph 6 of the complaint in Shaw v. American Academy of Pediatrics, in which Dr. Stoller is a plaintiff, reads:
“AAP participates in an association-in-fact enterprise with vaccine manufacturers (including Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi Pasteur), aligned entities such as the American Board of Pediatrics, and key spokespersons including members of AAP's Committee on Infectious Diseases.”
The American Board of Pediatrics is pleaded as a participant in a criminal racketeering enterprise. It is also the board that examined Kenneth Stoller in 1989, certified him as a specialist, and carried him on its register for twenty-one years.
It is not a defendant. Like Dr. Paul Offit, it is named as a racketeer in a federal pleading with no case to answer and no forum in which to answer it. Our record of that suit is at Racketeering: the lawsuit that calls recommending childhood vaccines organised crime.
One number not to confuse with another: his ABP certificate is 41497; his California physician's and surgeon's certificate, revoked in 2021, is A 41183.
And what it says about Paul Thomas
The same database holds a record for the other plaintiff, and it is not the same kind of record at all.
| Name | Thomas, Paul Norman — ABP ID #211083 |
| Certification area | General Pediatrics |
| Certificate number | 45756 |
| Certificate periods | 14 November 1990 – 31 December 1997, and 3 March 1998 – 9 April 2021 |
| Current status | Revoked, No Longer Certified |
| Actively maintaining certification | No |
| Address on file | Portland, Oregon |
Lapsed and revoked are different, and the two men are on different sides of it
Dr. Stoller’s status is “No Longer Certified” — expired or lapsed. Dr. Thomas’s is “Revoked, No Longer Certified,” which the ABP defines in one line: “The physician is not currently certified due to a violation of the ABP policies.”
Dr. Stoller let his certificate run out because, on his own evidence, hyperbaric practice had made it less valuable to him. The American Board of Pediatrics took Dr. Thomas’s away.
The ABP publishes the policy but not its reasons in any individual case. Its licensure rule requires a diplomate to “hold a valid, unrestricted allopathic and/or osteopathic medical license” in at least one jurisdiction, to hold every licence unrestricted if there is more than one, and to notify the Board in writing of any change, “including any disciplinary or non-disciplinary restriction.” It then provides: “If any medical license becomes invalid or restricted at any time, the Board may revoke the certificate(s).”
What we are not saying
Oregon emergency-suspended Dr. Thomas’s licence on 4 December 2020. The ABP’s record ends his certificate on 9 April 2021, four months later. The Board’s policy permits revocation where a licence becomes invalid or restricted, and the sequence fits — but the ABP does not publish its grounds in an individual case, and this page does not assert that the Oregon suspension was the reason. The dates and the policy are what the public record gives; the connection between them is an inference, and it is labelled as one.
Revocation is also discretionary rather than automatic, it carries a right of appeal under the ABP’s Appellate Review Procedure, and it is not necessarily permanent: the Board’s policy provides that when an encumbered licence “becomes reinstated in full,” the physician may petition to re-enrol and regain certification.
Both men were certified after May 1988, so neither was exempt from the continuing-certification requirement. And both certificates ended in the same window — Dr. Thomas’s in April 2021, Dr. Stoller’s California licence a month earlier, in March.
The board named as a racketeer is the board that certified one and de-certified the other
Paragraph 6 of Shaw v. American Academy of Pediatrics pleads an enterprise including “aligned entities such as the American Board of Pediatrics.” Paragraph 14 describes the two physician plaintiffs as men whose licences were taken for departing from AAP-endorsed criteria.
The American Board of Pediatrics certified Kenneth Stoller in 1989 and carried him for twenty-one years. It revoked Paul Thomas’s certificate in 2021. It is a defendant in nothing, has been served with nothing, and has no forum in which to answer the accusation made against it by name in that pleading.
New Mexico: a second licence, and a second revocation
California was not the only state to act, and the page said nothing about the other one until now. Kenneth Stoller held New Mexico licence 97-382, issued on 21 November 1997 — which fits the California findings exactly, since he moved to New Mexico in late 1998. The New Mexico Medical Board’s public register today gives his licence status in one word: Revoked.
| Matter | New Mexico Medical Board, Case No. 2021-025 (Inv. Case No. 2021-C-034) |
| Document | Decision and Order Revoking License, entered 24 January 2023 |
| Hearing | Evidentiary hearing 30–31 August 2022, by Zoom, venue Santa Fe. Hearing Officer Frank Weissbarth, Esq.; his report 14 November 2022 |
| Decided | Board meeting of 11 January 2023. The Board voted 5–2 to revoke. |
| Counsel | Kate Ferlic, Esq. for Dr. Stoller; Michael A. Nuñez, Esq. for the prosecution |
| Costs | $11,573.63, ordered 5 December 2023, payable within three months. Signed by Karen Carson, M.D., F.A.A.P., Chair |
He reported himself. The decision records at paragraph 2 that after California revoked his licence on 18 March 2021, Dr. Stoller “timely self-reported to the New Mexico Medical Board the discipline imposed by the Medical Board of California and provided the NMMB with relevant materials.” New Mexico issued its Notice of Contemplated Action on 22 October 2021. He requested a hearing, and got one.
The ground was narrow and purely reciprocal: section 61-6-15(D)(14) of the New Mexico Medical Practice Act, which makes “discipline imposed on a licensee by another licensing jurisdiction… based upon acts by the licensee similar to acts described in this section” unprofessional conduct in its own right. The Board was explicit about staying inside those lines: at paragraph 108 it held that anything the prosecution sought to establish beyond the California revocation was outside the scope of the notice, and it did not go there.
What New Mexico did not do, and an earlier matter that failed
This was not a fresh investigation into his New Mexico patients. The Board took the California revocation as the triggering fact, satisfied itself that the underlying acts were similar to acts the New Mexico statute covers, and revoked on that basis. Two of the seven members voted against it.
There had been an earlier New Mexico proceeding, Case No. 2014-031, arising from his treatment of one child between 2009 and 2012. Its central allegations were not proven. The hearing officer concluded in July 2015 that the prosecutor “failed to carry his burden” on the allegations of unnecessary treatment and of perpetuating harm — noting that the complaining physician herself “denied under oath that Dr. Stoller had unnecessarily treated the patient.” What was established was narrower: a failure to pass his records to a physician investigating the child’s welfare, which the hearing officer found “improperly motivated.” No public disciplinary action from that matter appears on the Board’s register. We record it because the file is public and a reader who finds it elsewhere is entitled to our account of what it did and did not establish.
The two experts, and why the Board discounted them
Dr. Stoller called two expert witnesses. Both, the decision records at paragraph 26, “were affiliated with Physicians for Informed Consent, a California non-profit organization” — the organisation whose own website lists Dr. Stoller as an advisor. Dr. James Neuenschwander is a member of it; Greg Glaser, Esq. is its General Counsel, and appeared as a fact witness about legal advice he had given Dr. Stoller.
Dr. Neuenschwander testified that he saw no violation of New Mexico standards and that the exemptions “were soundly reasoned and met the standard of care.” The Board gave that “little or no weight,” for three stated reasons, and two of them came out of the witness’s own mouth:
- The proceeding was not an opportunity to re-litigate what California had already decided.
- Paragraph 75: “Dr. Neuenschwander testified that his views concerning the risks of vaccines are not generally accepted in the general medical community.”
- Paragraph 76: he “could not give an opinion on Respondent’s reliance on genetic testing which he personally doesn’t use” — the genetic testing being the whole basis of several of the exemptions.
The standard of care is the AAP Red Book — which is what the racketeering suit wants corrected
At paragraph 89 the New Mexico decision records the standard applied: “the standard of care for writing pediatric vaccination exemptions… is to follow the ACIP Guidelines and AAP Red Book, and that any departure from these publications must be based on medical science.” The prosecution’s expert agreed, and the Board found a preponderance of the evidence established it.
The Red Book is the Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is the publication that Shaw v. American Academy of Pediatrics asks a federal court to order corrected, and the Committee on Infectious Diseases is named in paragraph 6 of that complaint as supplying “key spokespersons” to a racketeering enterprise.
So the document the suit calls an instrument of fraud is the document two state medical boards measured Dr. Stoller against — and found him wanting.
One complication, and it belongs here rather than in a footnote. The Academy itself does not argue that the Red Book states the standard of care. Defending the racketeering suit, it argues close to the reverse: at page 22 of its memorandum it says “the representation that the Red Book is ‘authoritative’ and ‘evidence-based’ is plainly a matter of scientific opinion” — because an opinion cannot be a false statement of fact, and a false statement of fact is what the complaint needs.
Both things are true at once, and they are not really in conflict. “Opinion” in the sense that defeats a fraud claim is not the same as “not the professional standard.” But a page that quoted the boards and left out the Academy’s own characterisation would be doing the thing this page exists to object to. The same memorandum adds, at the same page, that the Red Book “provides clinical guidance on a wide range of pediatric medical treatment, only a fraction of which concerns vaccines.”
Paragraph 90 goes further. It records that the California decision rejected his “unsupported assertions of a conspiracy between vaccine manufacturers and governments worldwide to bring vaccines to the market without adequate testing and to suppress information about the dangers of vaccines.” That is, in substance, the theory of the racketeering complaint — considered and rejected by a licensing board in 2021, five years before it was filed in the District of Columbia.
Two further findings carried over from California and recited in the New Mexico decision are worth having in plain sight. His use of genetic testing was “an extreme departure from the standard of care” (paragraph 91). And he testified in California that “he did not consider the ACIP Guidelines to offer reliable information for physicians regarding vaccinations” (paragraph 92).
One last point of scale. New Mexico’s own exemption standard is stricter than California’s: a physician there must certify that a required immunisation would “seriously endanger the life or health of the child.” The conduct California revoked him for would have had further to travel to be lawful in the state where he held his other licence.
Montana: where he lives, and the licence he has not sought
The racketeering complaint describes him as “Kenneth P. Stoller, M.D. of Bozeman, Montana.” That is an address, and it is worth saying what it is not.
He has lived in Montana for about four years. He has never applied for a Montana medical licence. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, reporting on him in August 2025, put it plainly: “Since moving to Montana, Stoller has not applied for a new license.” He told the paper he might ask the Montana board about reapplying if his lawsuit against the CDC succeeded.
So the licensure position is this. California revoked his licence in 2021. New Mexico revoked the second one. Montana, where he lives, has never had an application from him. There is no state in which he currently holds an active licence to practise medicine.
Nothing improper in living somewhere
Living in a state without holding its medical licence is entirely lawful and entirely ordinary — retired and non-practising physicians do it everywhere, and a physician who is not practising has no reason to hold a licence. No inference of wrongdoing arises from it and none is drawn here.
The reason it is worth recording is narrower. A federal pleading that introduces a plaintiff as a physician “of Bozeman, Montana” invites a reader to picture a doctor practising in Bozeman. He is not, and the complaint does not say he is. Readers checking a Montana registry for his name will not find him there, and should not mistake a similar surname for a match.
Before the Academy: the two of them sued the CDC
Five months before the racketeering complaint, these same two physicians sued the agency that actually sets the childhood schedule.
Thomas v. Monarez, No. 1:25-cv-02685, was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on a complaint dated 15 August 2025 — the same court that now has the racketeering case. The plaintiffs are Paul Thomas and Kenneth Stoller, backed by Stand for Health Freedom, an Indiana non-profit. Notably, that is not Children's Health Defense: a different organisation funded this one. Counsel is Richard Jaffe.
What it asks for is the schedule itself. A declaration that the CDC's vaccination practices are unconstitutional; an order vacating the “Category A” routine recommendations; reclassification of childhood vaccines as “Category B” shared clinical decision-making, which would move most of them from recommended to case-by-case; and an order requiring the CDC to study the cumulative schedule.
The docket is now in hand, current to 21 October 2026. It is assigned to Judge Jia M. Cobb, and its nature of suit is recorded as an Administrative Procedure Act review of agency action — which is what it is, and which matters below.
The sequence is short. The CDC moved to dismiss on 20 February 2026. Mr. Jaffe filed the opposition on 5 March. The government replied on 6 April 2026, after an agreed extension. Nothing of substance has happened since, apart from a change of government counsel in June. The motion has been fully briefed and undecided for more than six months.
One detail from the first day is worth recording without making too much of it. The complaint was rejected on filing for noncompliance with the local rules: it lacked the residence addresses of the parties, and it carried no signature. The clerk's notice gave a deadline of close of business and stated that the case would not proceed until the errors were fixed. A corrected complaint was filed the same day, so nothing turned on it.
Two motions, one courthouse, both waiting
Both of these cases are now in exactly the same posture. In each, the defendant has moved to dismiss; in each, briefing closed months ago; in each, a judge of the District of Columbia district court has yet to rule. The CDC case has been ripe since April, the Academy case since the summer.
The chronology sharpens a point made elsewhere on these pages. The racketeering complaint against the Academy was filed on 21 January 2026 — a month before the government had even responded to the CDC suit. They did not take the administrative route, wait to see how it fared, and turn to RICO when it failed. They opened the second front while the first was still unanswered.
Why this matters to the racketeering case
The standard criticism of the suit against the Academy — set out on our page on it — is that the childhood schedule is set by the federal government through ACIP, not by a private professional body, so a complaint aimed at the Academy routes around the actual decision-maker.
That criticism needs qualifying, and fairness requires qualifying it here. These two plaintiffs, through this lawyer, did sue the actual decision-maker, and did it first. They have not avoided the CDC; they have sued the CDC and the Academy both, in the same courthouse, five months apart, asking in substance for the same thing in each: reclassify the schedule and study it cumulatively.
What survives of the criticism is the narrower and better point. Suing the agency that sets a policy is ordinary administrative litigation, available to anyone who disagrees with a federal recommendation. Calling a professional body's publications a racketeering enterprise is something else, and the existence of the first suit does not make the second one sound. If anything the pair makes the choice starker: when the ordinary route was already open and already taken, the decision to also plead fraud and treble damages against a medical association was a choice, not a necessity.
The same lawyer, a fourth time
Dr. Stoller was represented before the Medical Board of California by Richard Jaffe.
Richard Jaffe is counsel for both these physicians in Thomas v. Monarez, the August 2025 suit against the CDC described above.
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 four appearances on four 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 the Montana licensure position and the CDC suit: Carly Graf, “Doctor who lost license over vaccine exemptions moves to Bozeman, sues the CDC,” Lee Newspapers Montana state bureau, published in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and sister papers, 19 August 2025, from which the quoted sentence about not having applied for a licence is taken; and “CDC's ‘Aggressive' Child Vaccine Program Targeted in Lawsuit,” Bloomberg Law, for the case number, plaintiffs and relief sought in Thomas v. Monarez, No. 1:25-cv-02685 (D.D.C.). The status of that case is unverified and is described as unknown above. 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.