Well there were people that thought books were the work of the devil when they first came out. It takes a 2 or 3 generations to get the most important ideas completely accepted. The Flynn effect is helpful here.
The Wakefield argument is weaker than it should be. Wasn't his paper retracted because of its funding source, not because of specific errors in the paper itself? At least that's what Wikipedia's article on Wakefield claims. And of the co-authors, they asked for retraction because of the stink in the press over the funding, again, not because of actual errors in the science. Those don't actually seem like valid reasons for retraction, on their face.
It had 12 co-authors so that's a lot of peer review to start with, before whatever the Lancet applied.
