Dr. Paul Thomas, a Portland-area pediatrician with roughly 15,000 patients, surrendered his Oregon medical license in December 2022 after the Oregon Medical Board found him guilty of unprofessional conduct, making false or misleading statements about the efficacy of his treatments, and repeated gross negligence in the practice of medicine. He agreed to never reapply for a license to practice medicine in Oregon. His Washington state license was indefinitely suspended shortly after, in March 2023.
What the Oregon Medical Board Found
The board’s investigation centered on a pattern of behavior: Thomas discouraged families from following the standard childhood vaccination schedule and, in some cases, actively pushed parents to refuse vaccines. In one documented instance, he told a mother to consider “how awful she would feel” if her child developed autism and “she could have prevented it,” framing vaccination as a cause of autism rather than presenting the medical evidence against that claim.
The board also found that Thomas failed to provide adequate informed consent. When patients or their families declined vaccines, he did not document discussions about the real risks of skipping immunization. Instead of laying out what could happen if a child went unvaccinated, his records showed referrals to homeopaths and recommendations for fish oil supplements. Several of his unvaccinated patients ended up hospitalized with vaccine-preventable illnesses.
The Tetanus Case
One case stood out in the board’s findings. A completely unvaccinated boy in Thomas’s practice, around six years old at the time, suffered a large, deep scalp laceration on a farm in August 2017. His parents treated the wound at home with colloidal silver and sutured it themselves. The child developed acute tetanus, a life-threatening bacterial infection that is almost entirely preventable through routine childhood vaccination.
The boy required intubation, a tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and spent nearly two months in the intensive care unit at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland. Thomas saw the patient after recovery but, according to the board, did not document any informed consent discussion about the risks and benefits of vaccinating a child who had just survived tetanus and remained vulnerable to it. His notes instead recorded a referral to a homeopath and supplement recommendations.
Connection to a Measles Outbreak
Thomas drew scrutiny well before the formal board action. A 2019 measles outbreak infected 73 children in Washington state and four more in Oregon. The outbreak brought renewed attention to physicians who were counseling families against vaccination. Pediatric infectious disease experts publicly called on the Oregon Medical Board to investigate Thomas, arguing that advising against the standard vaccine schedule put patients at direct risk from diseases like measles.
At the time, the board had never revoked a doctor’s license for advising against vaccines. That changed with Thomas’s case.
A Retracted Study
Thomas co-authored a 2020 study that compared health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children in his own practice. The paper, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, was used to support claims that unvaccinated children were healthier. It was later corrected after reviewers identified significant errors: the reported rate of ADHD in vaccinated children was listed as 0.063% when the actual figure was 5.3%, and the autism rate was listed as 0.84% when it was actually 0.361%. The mistakes came from counting office visits instead of actual diagnoses and from failing to convert probabilities to percentages. The study was eventually retracted.
The board cited Thomas’s public statements about the effectiveness of his alternative approach to vaccination as part of the charge of making false or misleading claims about his treatments.
The Final Agreement
On October 6, 2022, Thomas entered into a stipulated order with the Oregon Medical Board. Rather than face a full hearing, he agreed to surrender his license effective December 5, 2022, and to never reapply. The formal charges included unprofessional conduct, false or misleading statements about treatment efficacy, repeated gross negligence, willfully violating state medical practice law, failing to comply with a board request, and failing to report an adverse action.
The Washington Medical Commission followed in March 2023, indefinitely suspending his Washington license based on Oregon’s findings. Thomas later petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in a legal challenge related to the case, but as of 2025, his Oregon license status remains listed as “surrendered” on the state medical board’s verification database.