> Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. heroically tried to find

I'm not sure if that was supposed to be sarcastic, but these two people have done more harm to public health, and are responsible for more health dis/mis-information, than pretty much anyone I can think of. (I am a biochemist, no conflict of interest)

In gp’s defense—I interpreted their formulation to suggest vaccine skeptics applied effort to an heroic degree/amount, not that the effort was of heroic virtue. That is, that those people applied ridiculously high levels of effort to searching for an effect, and still did not find an effect.

As distinct from the retort that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”: It can be, if you’ve tried hard enough to gather the evidence and come up short—which is what these guys have done.