Please let me demonstrate my all-encompassing ignorance on this subject......
"how the hell could you tell a butchering of science from an elegant experiment?"
If you are referring to the proposed Autism-Vaccination link, I am willing to say that the science is still in question.
The studies I have read actually look at the causal relationship between autism and vaccination rates don't drill down far enough for what I believe needs to be looked at. They only look across the broad spectrum of a population.
jama.ama-assn.org
Autism has been shown to be linked to various genetics, environmental factors, plus antibodies, and the immune system of the mother.
74.125.155.132
From a simpletons view of biological logic, if autism is linked to the immune system, and genetic factors, and that vaccinations are immune system related, there might be a causal relationship.
If you have a study, I am interested, but I am looking for an experiment that looks at genetic autism predisposition, and Thimerosal, Thimerosal-free vaccinations.
My theory is that perhaps the problems with Thimerosal occurs in people that are inclined with autism. Since the causes, and levels of autism are not known, is seems reasonable that autism symptoms are fairly easy to instigate. Perhaps much easier than previously understood.
From a purely statistical point of view, just because we haven't found a causal relationship in certain conditions in a dataset, doesn't mean a causal relationship doesn't exist within a subset of the dataset, its all about the definition of outliers. We just haven't asked the right questions. While I am not positive there is a relationship, as a scientist, I am skeptical to write it off just yet.
