Where are the monkeys?
February 12th, 2010
[Kudos to KWombles who alerted me to this story]
This morning, when I went to find the Hewitson et al (2009) article in the journal Neurotoxicology - the article that had been the inspiration for my post “A ‘Made for Court’ Study?” - I found that it had been withdrawn (see here).
Given that there has been a recent cry of “Show me the monkeys!” from “the usual suspects” in anticipation of the next episode of Hewitson et al, I find the withdrawal of their first paper intriguing. I can’t help but wonder if this is somehow related to the results they intended to publish in their second paper - the one that “the usual suspects” have been crowing about.
The Pollyanna part of me (a very small part, I assure you) wants to believe that the authors have withdrawn the paper in order to correct its many serious flaws. Of course, this would require not just a simple re-write but a complete redesign of the study and starting again from scratch - rather like “remodeling” a house by tearing it out, foundation and all, filling in the hole and starting over. This may be the case.
Another possibility is that they want to re-do their statistical analyses and conclusion, since their data show not only that they cannot distinguish between thimerosal and the hepatitis B vaccine as a cause of the “neurodevelopmental abnormalities” but also that they can’t actually say that there was any significant difference between the treated and control groups. After all, negative results are results, too.
However, I suspect that the real reason may be that the editors of Neurotoxicology took a long, hard look at the paper and decided that it wasn’t worth publishing, after all. Some small (or large) part of the impetus behind that decision - if that is, indeed, what happened - might be the recent conclusions of the GMC regarding the “anchor” author, Andrew J. Wakefield. That’s not the best reason to withdraw the paper, but it’s better to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than not at all.
Whichever way it turns out, the “Show me the monkeys!” cry is going to sound a little more hollow now that the first article of the series has been withdrawn.
Doubtless, the first act of “the usual suspects” will be to paint this as part of the “massive conspiracy to supress the Truth about autism”. However, Neurotoxicology has been very sympathetic to the “something-in-vaccines-causes-autism” movement, publishing several low-quality studies by people (not necessarily even researchers - see this one) who feel that vaccines somehow cause autism, so it’s a bit of a stretch to start screaming that they are “censoring” autism research now.
We (or, at least, I) don’t know why the article was withdrawn, and it may be for reasons that I’ve not contemplated. But having an article withdrawn after being accepted is never a good thing. Again, I hope that it was withdrawn by the authors because they have read the criticisms about their study and want to re-write it to correct their mistakes. Of course, even though I hope that is the reason, I realise that isn’t the most likely reason. Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, where are the monkeys?!?
Prometheus
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