The purpose of this study is to allow the administration to say "Official CDC Study Concludes Vaccines Cause Autism". Then, the rebuttal to that statement will be not "No, there's no such study", but instead "yes it does, but the study was run by a discredited crank", which is a huge win because the target audience will stop reading after "yes".<p>The study doesn't need credibility for this purpose, it just needs to exist. I think it technically doesn't even need a body, just a title page and maybe an abstract to quote from.