[mennis16]

I agree it doesn't make sense for the purpose of convincing anti-vaxxers. But I do think sometimes valuable research topics end up getting thrown out "with the bathwater" so to speak when the general public gets too wrapped up in a pseudoscientific interpretation (especially when that interpretation was originally supported by some poorly done or fraudulent published research).

For example, galvanic skin response was used for very bullshit purposes, which led to research on it essentially stopping for over a decade. But recently it has been rebranded as "electrodermal activity", and turns out to have use for studying Epilepsy as well as other promising potential use cases (such as improving sleep staging without EEG).

I am less aware of literature on side effects for current vaccines, so I don't know if this same phenomenon has happened. But I wouldn't be surprised if certain lines of thinking are reflexively stomped down right now.

Maybe this just needs to be the natural life cycle of science though, it might be for the greater good to let anti-vax die down before doing anything which could stoke their flames.