The Lancet

The Lancet published the fraudulent Andrew Wakefield autism-vaccine study that fueled decades of anti-vax hysteria, and its retraction took 12 years—long enough to cause immeasurable public health damage. This delay is three times longer than the average retraction time for journals like Science, which took only 4 years to pull flawed stem cell papers. The study's legacy includes a 20% drop in MMR vaccination rates in the UK, leading to preventable measles outbreaks.