What has been obvious to skeptics for years has finally become obvious to all: The supposed link between vaccines and autism is a sham perpetrated in the name of litigation. in a scathing series of articles and editorial in the British Medical Journal, researcher Andrew Wakefield, who wrote an influential Lancet article in 1998 suggesting vaccines cause autism, has been exposed as a fraud. What’s worse, he was paid by lawyers to perpetrate his fraud, more than $675,000 over two years.

Wakefield’s theories and the shoddy research performed by a British lab helped fuel a similar wave of litigation in the U.S. with total disregard for the risk of needless injury and death they were helping to cause, trial lawyers and cheerleaders like Robert Kennedy peddled the story that the preservative thimerosol, containing minute traces of mercury, was the cause of an explosion in autism diagnoses. what they never said was this was a theory tailor-made for litigation. Science designed to serve the courtroom.

The lawyers had a problem, you see. Congress, recognizing that vaccines will injure and kill a predictable number of people each year while saving many more, passed a law in 1986 taking away the right to sue vaccine manufacturers in standard courts. The cases were funneled to a special vaccine court where damages would be paid out according to a schedule. Lawyers didn’t like that, preferring the potentially much larger verdicts they could get from a jury. So they began looking for a way around the vaccine court, and thought they found it with thimerosol, which by their reasoning wasn’t an active ingredient of the vaccine and thus wasn’t covered under the law.

As typically happens in high-stakes litigation, experts came out of the woodwork to supply the evidence the lawyers needed. and Wakefield was the champion, publishing the Lancet study that purported to show how vaccines had caused autism in 12 patients. According to investigative journalist Brian Deer, three of the 12, it turns out, had never been diagnosed with autism and others displayed symptoms long before they received vaccines. Deer cites a confidential memo from the lawyer who recruited Wakefield, setting out the researcher’s goals before he began:

He has deeply depressing views about the effect of vaccines on the nation’s children. he is also anxious to arrange for tests to be carried out on any children . . . who are showing symptoms of possible Crohn’s disease. The following are signs to look for. If your child has suffered from all or any of these symptoms could you please contact us, and it may be appropriate to put you in touch with Dr Wakefield.

The effects of this sham were widespread, and unconscionable. Vaccination levels plunged as low as 80% in the U.K., according to BMJ, well below the 95% needed to insure herd immunity. in 2008 measles was declared endemic in Britain and Wales, for the first time in 14 years, and the journal notes “hundreds of thousands of children in the UK are currently unprotected as a result of the scare.”

Parents in the U.S. followed the same course, without once being told by the lawyers that it was, in fact, a legal gambit and not a valid scientific theory.

The legal gambit has largely been demolished through a series of rulings by the vaccine court establishing first, that thimerosol is not an “adulterant” or “additive” lying outside the law and finally with the Cedillo decision in August. That decision by a three-judge appeals panel declared what would have been clear from the beginning, had Wakefield’s research methods and payments from lawyers been disclosed — that the case suffered from a “fatal deficiency:  …the lack of any persuasive evidence that the measlesvaccine can contribute to the causation of autism or gastrointestinal dysfunction.”

What makes this case particularly disturbing is that none of the outcry that accompanied the Vioxx scandal or other drug scares has erupted here. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of children have been needlessly exposed to injury or death to serve a flawed legal strategy and the lawyers are silent. Maybe because there’s nobody with deep pockets to sue.