As BMJ editor
Fiona Godlee noted in an accompanying
editorial, Wakefield’s paper “was in fact an elaborate fraud.”
This week, in a
second BMJ article, Deer provides evidence of a strong motivation for that fraud: money. Big money. For although Wakefield failed to disclose it when his Lancet paper was published, he was actively involved at the time in establishing several potentially lucrative autism-related medical businesses.
He and his investors wouldn’t make a dime, however, unless the MMR vaccine could be shown to be linked to what Wakefield declared was a new syndrome of brain and bowel disease — “autistic entercolitis.” (The existence of this syndrome is
now considered highly dubious.)
For one of his business ventures, Wakefield planned to develop his own “replacement” vaccine for MMR. For another, he intended to develop and sell testing kits that would let doctors diagnose autistic entercolitis. In a business prospectus for investors, Wakefield said the testing kits alone would generate $44 million in annual revenues.
He also said the initial market for the kits would be the “litigation driven testing of patients with AE [autistic entercolitis] from both the UK and USA.”
Wakefield knew something about the big money that could be earned from vaccine litigation. Before he published his Lancet paper, he had received the British pound equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars from a law firm involved in product liability suits against vaccine makers — another fact he failed to make public at the time.
Some of Wakefield’s business efforts were put into motion long before he knew the results of his research for the Lancet paper —
even before the first child in the study had been fully medically investigated, Deer reports.
For Wakefield, therefore, a lot of money rode on whether or not his research findings supported a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.
I did run a search to find publicly accessible sources to corroborate what I wrote yesterday: 
