Voices for Vaccines, Bust a Move, Burning Bridges

I've been having trouble focusing on blogging lately. A combination of lack of time and lack of will have led to a bit of a dry period. It's not that there isn't a lot to write about; there's tons. But I've been having trouble finding the motivation.

Recently, though, there are a few things that have cropped up that I felt I should write about. Each one could be the subject of a short post, but since they're all rather timely, I thought I'd just cram them all into a single post. I've put in some subject headers to help you skip around, if you prefer, but I hope you'll read it all.

Enjoy.

Notes from Andrew Wakefield's talk at Brandeis

This is a guest post by John Santos, who was able to attend Andrew Wakefield's recent talk at Brandeis University. The talk was also covered by the Brandeis Hoot (with an additional editorial) and the Boston Globe.

On April 13, 2011, I attended a talk by Andrew Wakefield at Brandeis University. The talk was sponsored by a student organization Spectrum, which is concerned with autism. The student who hosted the talk was Jake Crosby, who blogs at Age of Autism. I estimate there were about 75-100 people present.

Wakefield spoke for about 2 hours, followed by about 15 minutes of Q&A. I took notes, though it was hard to keep up and there may be many gaps here. Despite that, I hope it will be useful, especially as preparation for anyone attending one of his lectures in the future.

The talk was recorded (I saw at least one person with a video camera), and Crosby said it would be available on the web, at the AoA site, I think.

The talk raised many questions in my mind, some of which I've had a chance to do some research on. I'm at least passably familiar with the vaccine controversy, but many of the references went by too fast for me to fully understand. I imagine to someone with no background at all, it would have completely snowed them. I agree with what Steven Novella has pointed out many time, if you are going to debate with a pseudoscientist, you really need to be on top of your game. I didn't feel capable of doing this, so I didn't ask any questions.

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Will Wonders Never Cease?

I've been checking the comments section of the Age of Autism article David Gorski’s Financial Pharma Ties: What He Didn’t Tell You the past few days to see how things have developed. Imagine my surprise this morning to see not one, not two, but three comments that go against the general ideology of AoA!

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A Correction

So, I need to make a bit of a correction to a comment I made on April 2. I'm not bothering to copy this to Age of Autism, since it'll never see light there, but I did want to at least admit when I was wrong...well, sorta wrong.

In the AoA article I was responding to, Jake Crosby wrote:

Thorsen was the second highest listed co-author from the university that led the Danish study on the MMR.

For the thimerosal study, he specified "from the university department".

Now, I took this to imply that Jake was saying that Thorsen was second-highest listed co-author overall, which has been the general (incorrect) position of Age of Autism. Minor reading comprehension fail on my part.

However, it seems that Jake is taking a slightly different tack. Rather than second most important author overall, Jake is saying that he is second most important author from the university (or department, in the thimerosal case), as if that somehow makes the argument stronger that Thorsen had significant influence on the studies.

I'm not sure if Jake just doesn't understand scientific research, if he's playing off the AoA schtick or something else. Because, when it comes down to it, his argument is even weaker than the AoA route, despite being more grounded in fact. I guess this would be best illustrated with an example, from a lay perspective though it may be.

Suppose that several labs are collaborating on a study. There would be the main lab of Dr. Smith, at the University of Veritasia, where the primary investigator (Dr. Smith) is employed and where the majority of the work and analysis is being done, but they also involve Dr. Jones' lab at Gruntville University. The extent of the Jones lab is that a research assistant and the lab tech performed a little bit of bench work, say, creating some growth media that were then sent over to the Smith lab. Due to their work, the RA and tech get credit in the paper's author list, even though their contribution was minimal. In the resulting paper, they could be listed alphabetically or by how much they contributed to that part of the work. One would be the "highest-listed co-author from Gruntville University" and one would be second-highest.

However, in the grand scheme of the paper and the results drawn from the study, they are not particularly important. They don't have any influence on the data analysis. They don't have any influence on the conclusions. In short, they don't have any real influence on the validity of the study.

So, I was wrong about my specific complaint against Mr. Crosby. But regarding his protestations against Thorsen, the question remains, "So what?"

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