In February 2004, after a four-month investigation, reporter Brian Deer wrote in The Sunday Times of London that, prior to submitting his paper to The Lancet, Wakefield had received £55,000 from Legal Aid Board solicitors seeking evidence to use against vaccine manufacturers, that several of the parents quoted as saying that MMR had damaged their children were also litigants, and that Wakefield did not inform colleagues or medical authorities of the conflict of interest.[1] When the editors of The Lancet learned about this, they said that based on Deer's evidence, Wakefield's paper should have never been published because its findings were "entirely flawed".[2] Although Wakefield maintained that the legal aid funding was for a separate, unpublished study[53] (a position later rejected by a panel of the UK General Medical Council), the editors of The Lancet judged that the funding source should have been disclosed to them.[54] Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief, wrote, "It seems obvious now that had we appreciated the full context in which the work reported in the 1998 Lancet paper by Wakefield and colleagues was done, publication would not have taken place in the way that it did."[55] Several of Wakefield's co-researchers also strongly criticized the lack of disclosure.[2]