15. Andrew Wakefield’s Fraud Cost Him His Medical License
Among the many things that Dr. Wakefield had not mentioned when he submitted his study to The Lancet, was not just how much he was paid to make those claims, but how much he stood to make down the road from his fraud. The British physician stood to make up to $43 million per year from selling test kits linked to his bogus study and the supposed connection between vaccines and autism. On top of that, several of the parents used in his “study” were litigants engaged in lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies.
Naturally, Wakefield had failed to disclose any of those conflicts. With egg on The Lancet’s face, its editor-in-chief wrote: “It seems obvious now that had we appreciated the full context in which the work reported in the 1998 Lancet paper by Wakefield and colleagues was done, publication would not have taken place”. After the vaccine study was revealed as a fraud, it was retracted by The Lancet. As to Dr. Wakefield, he was found guilty by British medical authorities of serious professional misconduct and fraud and had his medical license revoked.
