why the latest vaccine study will go to waste
Anti-vaccine activists funded the most complete and thorough study of vaccine safety done to their exact specifications. Now they're livid because it found nothing even remotely concerning.
As on every other day that ends in "y," every plausible, implausible, and grasping-at-straws-to-keep-it-alive association between vaccines and autism was ruled out by a mountain rage worth of studies. But for anti-vaxxers, like for any ideological movement, not finding proof of their core belief only means that no one is looking hard enough because if scientists and doctors who did those studies weren't all on the take from Big Pharma or the alien lizards who secretly ruled our world for thousands of years, they would've found that vaccines are nothing but a soup of brain melting toxins. And so, with that general approach in mind, an anti-vaccine group funded a very thorough study of vaccine schedules on macaques which looked for any difference in the brains of vaccinated and non-vaccinated monkeys. Every hypothesis they had was thrown in, from the different vaccination schedules, to thimerosal-containing shots, and any the brain tissues of the test subjects was going to be examined for even the slightest sign of possible abnormalities.
After observing the behaviors of all the monkeys as they grew, learned new skills, and studying the brains of some 36 of those with the most extreme vaccination application differences, there was absolutely no trace of anything abnormal in their neurons. None. Zip. Zilch. Which, if you're paying attention to the science, is exactly what you'd expect unless the blood-brain barrier in all complex organisms simply vanished overnight. The only difference between a vaccinated and a non-vaccinated child is the likelihood of catching some diseases because we're now pretty sure that the key causes of autism are genetic and affect the development of inhibitory neurons, not trace amounts of chemicals that yuppies who refuse to understand the concept of dosage think are toxic because some greedy, scientifically illiterate internet cranks told them so. There have been cases where vaccines had medically significant adverse effects but those cases are quite literally fewer than one in a million, and they have nothing to do with mental development.
But if you think that SafeMinds, the anti-vaccine think tank that funded this study is going to just shrug and accept it, you would be wrong. Instead, it's adamantly claiming that it was mislead by reports from the team and accusing the researchers of cherry-picking their data, demanding to do its own statistical analysis on the findings. In other words, they didn't get the study they really wanted and are now trying to save face by accusing the scientists of doing what they wanted to do in the first place: fake it ‘till they make it and cherry-pick the data until they got the result they paid for. Far too many autism biomed cranks and quacks are depending on them being right to keep bilking parents to turn their kids into guinea pigs, and far too many parents are convinced that whatever is wrong with their child was caused by vaccines, SafeMinds and groups like it go to any lengths to keep the manufactroversy going. It must be the vaccines, it cannot not be the vaccines, they've invested too much time, money, and emotion for it not to be the vaccines. To them, this study is already "discredited" because wouldn't give them what they needed.
