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.

I was being highly, highly sarcastic. People still banging the vaccine-autism drum are heroes only in their own mind.

Yeah that was my charitable reading as well, but with the incredible prevalence of anti-vax/vaccine skepticism, you can never be sure. I thought clarifying could be helpful!