You say "even" Bill Maher as if to imply this is surprising. Maher frequently speaks out against "western" medicine on his show. It's a topic on which he often says silly stuff.
We live in a world that has trolls. Online comment systems are still working on how to distinguish authority from popularity. Unfortunately, trolls make media companies money with tales of pain and suffering. Not to mention that pretty people on TV get heard no matter their qualifications. Their is no mystical counter or social graph displayed on the TV screen next to the former Playboy model.
There are days I hate that technology has advanced so far to compensate for common sense.
People aren't "letting the state do their thinking for them". More correctly, members of the anti-vaccine movement don't seem to be doing much thinking at all:
1) Why has the anti-vaccine movment failed to produce any credible evidence at all in the years it exists? Credible means peer reviewed journal articles that haven't later been discredited. It does not include discredited papers, poorly made websites exhorting readers to "do their own research", or statements by ex-playmates.
2) Why haven't they managed to produce directly reproducible evidence, at least in an animal model, of vaccination leading to autistic-type behaviours? Given they've managed to induce autistic-type behaviours in mice through genetic manipulation this should not be an impossible task.
3) Why would you trust a group of people who approach a problem in an intellectually bankrupt fashion? Rather than asking "what causes autism", and conducting research to determine this, they've decided "vaccines cause autism" and then tried to support this in the face of all available evidence. (A similar deception is employed by intelligent design advocates).
Listening to the overwhelming medical consensus isn't letting the state do your thinking for you, particularly when the alternative is so unimpressive.
