The British Medical Journal recently published the second part of Brian Deer’s dissection of Andrew Wakefield’s vaccine scam. In it, Deer follows the money and shows how the discredited ex-doc planned to make millions by whipping up fear and mistrust of the MMR vaccine. Seems Wakefield wasn’t just getting paid to put together evidence for a class action lawsuit against the pharmaceutical industry, he also stood to make a fortune by selling an alternative to the standard MMR vaccine and through a test he developed for Crohn’s disease.
For more detail, you can read the BMJ article which is quite good (but also quite long and a tad dry). Or, for a shorter, audio summary of the piece, have a listen to this week’s Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. It’s the second segment, starting at about the 13:50 mark. (The first segment is about a new exo-planet! Exo-planets are cool!)