The story fits too easily into the trope of unscrupulous trial lawyers, but it looks like the researcher who made the autism/vaccination claims was paid big bucks by lawyers who hoped to cash out on lawsuits.
Now, the whole conspiracy theory about vaccines causing autism is surrounded by melodramatic wailing and junk science, but on the other hand it’s awfully hard to give complete faith to the paternalism of the medical establishment.
That won’t be the last we hear of this story, or of others like it.
Secretly Ironic 