The Sunday Times Online has an article on the financial backing of the denialist Andrew Wakefield, who led a successful campaign to decrease confidence in vaccination by falsely claiming there is a link between vaccination and autism.

These claims have since been thorough debunked as the removal of thimerosal (the adjuvant blamed for the problem) has had no effect on rates of autism, not that there ever was firm epidemiologic evidence between the two events. The conflicts of interest in this particular case, and the negative effects of the misinformation and fear of vaccination that was spread are astounding.

ANDREW WAKEFIELD, the former surgeon whose campaign linking the MMR vaccine with autism caused a collapse in immunisation rates, was paid more than £400,000 by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.

The payments, unearthed by The Sunday Times, were part of £3.4m distributed from the legal aid fund to doctors and scientists who had been recruited to support a now failed lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers.

...

Wakefield's work for the lawyers began two years before he published his now notorious report in The Lancet medical journal in February 1998, proposing a link between the vaccine and autism.

This suggestion, followed by a campaign led by Wakefield, caused immunisation rates to slump from 92% to 78.9%, although they have since partly recovered. In March this year the first British child in 14 years died from measles.

Later The Lancet retracted Wakefield's claim and apologised after a Sunday Times investigation showed that his research had been backed with £55,000 from lawyers, and that the children in the study used as evidence against the vaccine were also claimants in the lawsuit.

At the time Wakefield denied any conflict of interest and said that the money went to his hospital, not to him personally. No disclosure was made, however, of the vastly greater sums that he was receiving directly from the lawyers.

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Also among those named as being paid from the legal aid fund was a referee for one of Wakefield's papers, who was allowed £40,000. A private GP who runs a single vaccines clinic received £6,000, the LSC says.

So, the question I have is how much would they have to pay you to undermine the public health of your country? I think 400k seems pretty cheap, if you'll undermine your nation's public health (and really the US and Europe too were affected) with lies for under a million US, that's a pretty serious scumbag.

Orac has more about the serious payola from lawyers going to all sorts of doctors involved in the anti-vaccination scam. It's pretty sick, medical experts were paid off, reviewers on papers were paid off, and all of these people deserve jail and loss of their medical licenses.

Labels: denialism, vaccination