That is a horrible occurrence, especially when it's something to do with biomedical advances or technologies that are helping people and have led people astray.
It is something that happens all over the research landscape. You can look at any field and find retractions. You'll find that the retractions and the allegations of poor research practice are restricted to a small subset of researchers, so it's not common.
At the same time, what we're doing currently is literally “publish or perish”. When I came up through the system, people said you had to have a lot of papers. It wasn't so much about the quality. Some of us resisted what they used to call “least publishable units”, which means chop it up as fine as possible. That's the kind of mindset that pushes people to fabricate data.
The way we control for that is with things exactly like Retraction Watch. There are people now who have tools and are looking for fabrication in figures and in statistical methodologies. On the other side, really rigorous peer review can protect against this. The problem is that it's not always applied in the ways it should be, because of, to be honest, nepotistic effects.