Sunday Times in the context of "News UK"

Maggie O'Farrell FRSL (born 1972) is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was co-adapted for the screen with Chloe Zhao in 2025. Her 2022 historical novel The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.

On 28 February 1998, a fraudulent research paper primarily authored by physician Andrew Wakefield, along with twelve other coauthors (titled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children"), was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal. The paper falsely claimed causative links between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and colitis, and between colitis and autism. The fraud involved data bias and manipulation, and two undisclosed conflicts of interest. It was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer, resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010 and Wakefield being discredited and struck off the UK medical register three months later. In the paper, Wakefield fabricated evidence to suggest a new "syndrome" existed, which he called "autistic enterocolitis". Wakefield had been employed by a lawyer representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine producers, and had reportedly earned up to US$43 million per year selling diagnostic kits for the non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered. He also held a patent to a rival measles vaccine at the time.

The scientific consensus on vaccines and autism is that there is no connection between MMR (or any other vaccine) and autism.