Populist science and the destruction of expertise
By 
A former editor of JAMA is arguing that it’s a good thing to do yet more studies on whether vaccines cause autism, because a lot of the public don’t believe the studies that have concluded universally that it doesn’t:
Nothing resembling a genuine intellectual culture, whether scientific or humanistic, can survive this sort of attitude.
There is at this point no more reason to believe vaccines cause autism than there is to believe vanilla ice cream does. The only reason this was ever even a question is because of one subsequently retracted study, that was not merely wrong but actively fraudulent.
That it’s impossible to rule out in terms of some sort of metaphysical Cartesian certainty that vaccines or vanilla ice cream or an essentially infinite number of other things cause autism is a trivial observation, that should have zero effect on the question of whether scarce resources should be spent on testing paranoid crackpot hypotheses, even if the public is increasingly socialized to believe in paranoid crackpot hypotheses.
The answer to that question remains “no.”