Sen. Bernie Sanders accused Kennedy of praising Andrew Wakefield, the primary author of a now-debunked paper from the U.K. in 1998, which allegedly found that MMR vaccines cause autism. The paper was discredited by health experts and retracted from the journal in which it was published. In 2004, an investigation by The Sunday Times accused Wakefield of a conflict of interest, alleging that some of the parents of the children in the paper were suing vaccine manufacturers prior to its publication and that Wakefield had received funding to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, which was not disclosed in the Lancet article. As a result, 10 of the 13 authors withdrew their support. In 2010, Wakefield lost his medical license after an investigation found he had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting his research. Over a dozen high-quality studies have since found no evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism.