#poor monkeys

[myinternetcorner]

[rkdemay]

[psychingmyselfup]

I don't think they actually lobotomized the monkeys, per se. But it makes for a great header and I can tell you aallllll about it now 😂

[brilliantmistake]

In which I rant a bit about that which has already been ranted by my betters

Today turned out to be one of those days that I spend more time obsessing over and looking up references related to various science controversies rather than get anything done. It started over at The Awl, where I was annoyed by the maybe-not-so-great Pacific garbage patch (but not you, Bry! Love ya!) and continued over at Gawker, where the anti-vaccination scandal awaited. 

Gawker had a nice ask-the-author post with Seth "that's really how you spell it" Mnookin, whose book, The Panic Virus, details the vaccination scare ginned up by Andrew Wakefield to fuel lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies. 

One of the comments linked me over to Jenny McCarthy's response to the latest Wakefield revelations (Summary: Cleopatra ain't the only queen of the Nile). I only glanced at the many, many comments, but noticed one seemed to have an actual reference to an actual peer-reviewed scientific article demonstrating a link between vaccines and autism. Could it be true?

No, of course not. The article (pdf) claims to show a link between thimerosol containing vaccines and unusual amygdyla growth in rhesus monkeys. Which, first of all, amygdyla growth is not autism. Bascially, they took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mother and gave them to cloth covered wire mommies. The monkeys were then either given thimerosol containing vaccine, a saline injection, or no injections at all. Then they were given a shitload of tests.

Even with no medical or monkey training, I can tell you the experimental design on this thing is terrible. A control group of 2? No. Especially with all the complicated statistics they claim to have run. Not that I want more monkey babies to suffer over this crappy research, but if you're going to do terrible things to monkey babies you better have a damn good reason and even better experimental design. 

Also, they used vaccine with thimerosol. Scratch that, they bought vaccine, which, like all modern vaccines, contains NO THIMEROSOL. Then they dumped some thimerosol in and gave it to the monkeys. The justification being, I assume, that they were interested in the effects of old school vaccines with thimerosol. And that's fine, but it also means they need another control group, i.e. vaccines without thimerosol. And as their own protocol demonstrates, those thimerosol-free vaccines are readily available. 

Update: I ranted out this whole thing, only to realize (1) This isn't actually what I intended the post to be about and (2) Orac has already covered this thing much better than I can. Whatever, I'm posting it, and putting the amusing thing I meant to post about above.