Re: "I think doctor lied to me"..more doom and gloom

...he said "Dr. Wakefield was paid by lawyers and has retracted his statements" along with 10 other doctors. Well, I'm being objective here and you might not want to hear this, but if the doctor was paid initially by lawyers to opine an opinion, then this behavior shows you can get any testimony you want from doctors by paying them! (And researchers who are not medical doctors are not far behind.)

Here is another possibility in the Universe of all possibilities.
Dr. Wakefield and friends may have been approached by a second set of lawyers who offered the doctors more money than the first set of lawyers did to change their opinion from what was initially printed.

Sometimes you have to use your knowledge of people and what happened to them in similar circumstances and apply it to this case to understand it. For instance, Dr. Wakefield may not have wanted to be outspoken on this issue unless he could get some of his peers to stand up with him. Nothing wrong with that. If you are speaking your mind and you know most of the people in your profession don't agree with you need to know some of your peers will back you up. After all, you didn't spend a decade or more preparing for a profession and working in it just so you can be shunned by the profession whenever you open your mouth to say something. And where are all your referrals going to come from if you are shunned by those supposed to do the referring? And wouldn't your articles be rejected by those prestigious professional journals? So one has to consider this when you go against the majority opinion of your particular reference group. Maybe that was his (Dr. Wakefield's) opinion, and he was paid by lawyers to put up with the resulting pressure when he spoke publicly.

After he went public with his statement you don't know what pressures were brought to bear against him, the 10 others or the first set of lawyers. Or against all of them. As for who started to drop out first, your guess is as good as mine.

Trade unions, medical associations and others will help you make great strides in your career. But some of these groups can make what they call "consensus" not a democratic thing but a galling,
repetitive, roll call of opinions until those persons objecting are forced to agree with the majority opinion at the meeting. So when the AMA and other medical groups come out with their consensus statements not all doctors are in whole hearted agreement with it.

You ought to go back and ask this pediatrician where he got his information and what he thinks or heard that went on behind the scenes. Maybe that was his conjecture. If you read the same article he did, you may have had a different opinion. Doctors learn which buttons to push to get the behavior they want. Not any different than salesmen when they want you to buy an article, or an idea. Did he want you to decide something right away? Scare you? Who knows.