Andrew Wakefield is the surgeon who kicked off the MMR vaccine/autism bandwagon with his 1998 paper, and at the time he had a financial interest in talking up the risk of vaccines, having entered into a cozy relationship with another ambulance chaser:
To understand Wakefield's conduct, it's hard to overlook his hidden financial interests. To the later declared surprise of his colleagues, two years before the Lancet paper was published, his research on the children had begun, not just with a desire to collaborate with Barr, but with a lucrative financial contract to join the team preparing the lawsuit. In February 1996, Wakefield agreed to work for Barr at a rate of £150 an hour - a great deal of money for a retained expert at that time - in addition to his Royal Free salary. And as the Sunday Times investigation revealed in February 2004, the proposal submitted to the Legal Aid Board (now the Legal Services Commission) in June 1996 meant money to support Wakefield's work.
Shunning competing explanations for how MMR might cause injuries, and without any medical or scientific review, Barr was authorised to pay Wakefield a maximum of £55,000 from public funds to perform the research in the June 1996 proposal. This was to provide for "clinical and scientific" tests on ten client children in the hunt for evidence for the lawsuit. Interviewed by Brian Deer in 2004, Barr - by now working for the larger law firm Alexander Harris - confirmed that he'd arranged finance for the study published in the Lancet of February 1998. But then, after public uproar followed the first Sunday Times reports, he avoided any further comment.
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The explosive revelation about Wakefield's £55,000, however, only scratched the surface of his pecuniary advantage. On the legal front, in December 2006, the Legal Services Commission answered a Freedom of Information Act request from Brian Deer with a spreadsheet of fees to paid witnesses in the MMR lawsuit, stating that, since joining Barr ten years previously, Wakefield had been paid £435,643 (about $780,000), plus expenses, for his role in backing the generic case against MMR. This money - which is believed to have been augmented by yet more, still undisclosed, for work on individual children's records - was drawn against the cash-limited UK legal aid fund, intended to help poor people gain access to justice. During this period, Wakefield and his wife built a house on land purchased adjacent to their home, which was offered for sale in March 2007 priced £2,950,000 ($5,677,550).
http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm
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