the labors of Sisyphus

Okay, so some funder spent big bucks for a nationwide cohort study in Denmark that proves, for the nineteen billionth time, that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. The researchers followed 657,461 from birth through four years, and they actually found that the autism risk for vaccinated children was lower than for unvaccinated children. However, because the 95% confidence interval crossed zero, they more conservatively reported that "that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination."

Now that's all very fine and we're glad to hear it. The problem is that we already knew this and there was never the slightest reason to suspect otherwise but --

It will make absolutely no difference to the true believers. Facts, evidence, logic, science, are all irrelevant to this fake controversy. There are people who have staked their careers, their fame and fortune, their reputations and/or their tribal identity on the utterly false claim that there is an association between vaccination and autism and nothing, nothing, nothing will ever persuade them otherwise.

Now, I suspect that many if not most flat-earthers are just goofing, but PZ Myers has found the ultimate in motivated reasoning. These clowns spent $20,000 on a laser gyroscope to prove that the earth does not rotate. Not surprisingly, they discovered a 15 degree per hour drift.  (That would be 360/24, to be precise.) So what do they have to say? "We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for easy to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth."

This makes me very sad because we face a dire planetary emergency and the people running the country are in the same category as anti-vaxers and flat-earthers. They are in an alternate reality.