Steven Wakefield’s now discredited paper in Lancet claiming a tie between autism and vaccines is now more than just a zealot doing bad science.
Brian Deer of the British Medical Journal reveals that it was outright fraud:
In the first part of a special BMJ series, Brian Deer exposes the bogus data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and reveals how the appearance of a link with autism was manufactured at a London medical school.
………
Unknown to Mr 11, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit, for which he sought a bowel-brain “syndrome” as its centrepiece. Claiming an undisclosed £150 (€180, $230) an hour through a Norfolk solicitor named Richard Barr, he had been confidentially 8 put on the payroll two years before the paper was published, eventually grossing him £435 643, plus expenses.
(emphasis original)
Now the question is when he goes to jail for fraud, though if I were the prosecutor, I would add felony murder to the bill of indictment as well.