After all, here is a man who did not disclose his conflicts of interest, namely that he was in the pocket of trial lawyers interested in suing vaccine manufacturers to the tune of £435,643 in fees, plus £3,910 expenses. As we say, them's some seriously righteous bucks, the equivalent of a full R01 grant here in the U.S. But it was worse than that. As Brian Deer discovered, Wakefield was also working on a competing vaccine alternative to the MMR and had even filed a patent application for it, meaning that results casting doubt on the safety of the MMR vaccine would be very helpful to him in marketing a competing vaccine. As for Wakefield's incompetence, that was made manifest during the Autism Omnibus proceeding when world-renowned PCR expert Stephen Bustin testified about the laboratory where the specimens from Wakefield's clinical trial were sent to be analyzed for measles virus sequences. The long version of his testimony is discussed here. The short version is that the laboratory was contaminated with plasmid containing measles virus sequences, and that the "positive" readings for measles virus in the ileal samples sent to the laboratory were false positives because of the contamination. Add to that the findings of the GMC, namely that he experimented on children without obtaining proper ethics committee approval and that he did invasive procedures on children that were not medically indicated, and the picture of Andrew Wakefield that emerges is anything but flattering.
