beepp

I do not consider myself educated on the matter of vaccines and am ill-equipped to defend any position on either side :) To your point, proving a negative such as "vaccines definitively do NOT cause autism, ever" with 100% certainty is nontrivial. I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence that they are causally linked to autism, which is usually the claim.

At this point, there is no _credible_ evidence I'm aware of that suggests vaccines cause autism. Hence, a doctor dismissing those claims is reasonable and expected. There is no claim here that non-experts necessarily have the same credibility as experts.

My statement was more in reference to e.g. the use by some experts of esoteric and potentially inaccurate models to silence critique by overwhelming non-experts with jargon. "I spent years developing this model, what do you know?"

I have edited my post to rectify this. Thank you for the suggestion.

I certainly agree that experts of various calibers and professions are frequently wrong. However, if I have an agenda, I haven't figured out what it is yet ;)

Thank you! Will add the source.

Thank you for this link! I knew others must have covered this ground more systematically than I could.

If you re-read the quote you pasted, you'll see that I accommodate your point of view (I think) - they human in your scenario BELIEVES that they do no wrong. I am trying to at least ask the question, "are you sure about that?"