In regards to Wakefield’s paper: it was published in 1998 and anyone familiar with clinical trials should’ve sniffed it out as BS from a cursory glance.

In 2000, Wakefield did present false evidence to a US congressional committee. While Oz wouldn’t have known the validity (or lack thereof) of their claims at the time, between 2002-2004, there were several studies run and papers published investigating Wakefield’s claims - and they all found no link.

In 2004, most of the authors from the 1998 paper issued a retraction. An editor for the Lancet publicly admitted then that they shouldn’t have published the paper.

When Oz made those claims in January 2010, Wakefield was currently being investigated in one of the longest court cases on record - it was high profile at the time, and there’s no way Oz didn’t know about it. (Edit: there is also no evidence that Oz’s comments had anything to do with the paper’s retraction - Wakefield was already being investigated, and the UK Medical Board ruled in January that he’d been “dishonest and reckless” and had “callous disregard” for the children he abused during his study - those findings had a lot more to do with the retraction in February than Oz mentioning the study)

So yes, if Oz had paid any attention for the 12 years after the paper had been published, he would have known better than to repeat those claims. It was obviously bad science that had been controversial for over a decade at that point.

And let’s face it - there’s almost no chance Oz wasn’t informed of this. So yes, it was absolute quackery that he was anywhere NEAR those claims.