There’s a number of points this comment misses. First, it wasn’t pharmaceutical companies, but moms group of autistic children that approached him.

[I]n 1995, while conducting research into Crohn’s disease, he was approached by Rosemary Kessick, the parent of a child with autism, who was seeking help with her son’s bowel problems and autism; Kessick ran a group called Allergy Induced Autism. In 1996, Wakefield turned his attention to researching possible connections between the MMR vaccine and autism.

And the time, he was still a well regarded scientist and doctor:

At the time of his MMR research study, Wakefield was senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine

This was also published in 1998 in The Lancet an important medical journal, but the controversy didn’t start with this publication, but his press conference after the publication where he did advocate for single vaccines and not a combined MMR. Pretty poor form and highly criticized at the time.

The media took this and ran with it. It caused wide spread misinformation about autism and the MMR vaccine. But it was also a media outlet that began to tear apart the claims in 2004.

It wasn’t retracted until 2010 and a full write up about what went wrong in the BMJ in 2011. There was a lot of criticism before then, but I was also highly cited as well.

There’s a lot of lessons to be learned here and that is best done with the full story.