They deserve to be under scrutiny for conflict of interest but if you were running a pharma company who would you want to hire? I know I would be hiring someone who's an expert and there are your experts right there.
Yes, and I wonder how many decisions were made in the preceding years in the name of networking - feathering their future nest...

Also, Wakefield wasn't "paid off" - the lawyers were providing funding for a cohort study. While this is a conflict of interest, if we had to rule out any study that was funded by a stakeholder with a vested interest in the outcome of the study, you would have to write off at least 90% of ALL research as fraudulent. It is a sad fact in scientific research. It has to be funded by someone to get done, and it's usually those who have something to either gain or lose by the outcome who fund it.

There's a big difference between that, and stealing a million dollars to buy yourself a house and a motorbike, all the while forging receipts for research like Thorsen did. If he was forging receipts that means the research wasn't actually being done - so why haven't these studies full of phantom research been pulled?