Yeah, I love the Lancet, and it's worthy of respect, but it is also a relatively "activist" journal, to the extent such a thing can exist in medical publishing.
I suspect much of what we see from them lately (including a recent call from the EIC, who was already the EIC when the Wakefield paper was published, for more activist journals) was powered by the soul-searching they did in the wake of Wakefield. But keep in mind that although Lancet knew by 2004 there were almost certainly disqualifying disclosure issues with the paper, it still took them til 2010 to actually retract the article.
The culture around retraction has changed quite a bit since then, too - probably in no small part due to the development of the Retraction Watch database, established ... in 2010 - although arguably not enough.
I suspect much of what we see from them lately (including a recent call from the EIC, who was already the EIC when the Wakefield paper was published, for more activist journals) was powered by the soul-searching they did in the wake of Wakefield. But keep in mind that although Lancet knew by 2004 there were almost certainly disqualifying disclosure issues with the paper, it still took them til 2010 to actually retract the article.
The culture around retraction has changed quite a bit since then, too - probably in no small part due to the development of the Retraction Watch database, established ... in 2010 - although arguably not enough.