The full paper is here and, as usual, it's hardly anything and decontextualized in order to get a publishable result.

This one is so bad that it doesn't use established baselines or do any form of statistical analysis on the results instead opting for their own "baseline" measurements using very small sample sizes. It also plays a smoke and mirrors game where it shows a result for short term immunological response and then uses that to insinuate the 'slightly reduced but still likely well within the error of the poor control' long term effects are worth noting.

Other major flaws:

• As others have mentioned, mice are a terrible model for this as their skin is very thin and proper tattooing is near impossible.
• They mention verifying with human cadavers but don't include any data from those.
• There was no control group, the baseline was an untreated mouse, not one with an acute foot trauma.
• Mice age very quickly, best I can tell the immunological markers weren't age controlled. 2 months out of a <2 year lifespan is a lot of aging. Again, if there was a proper control to measure against.
• The obsfucation of the raw data into cheesy and unreadable box and whisker plots is hella suspicious.

At best it's a very poorly communicated and poorly designed experiment but I suspect that's due to it result hunting.

how low? weakened by how much?

I think they leave that out on purpose so they can make these sensational claims… if your immune system takes a 0.02% hit, nobody would care

Why not be a professional scientist by:

• adding "in mice" to the title;
• using modern statistical methods instead of continuously discredited procedures like p-values?

Surely someone could check this by doing a statistical analysis of cancer patients with tattoos vs how many of the general population has tattoos?

There are far too many humans with tattoos that could have been researched extensively, but they chose mice. Mice do not have the same kind of skin density as humans, and I doubt a tattoo artist or researcher would have the talent to tattoo a mouse's skin.

There's just so many things wrong with using mice in this study. So many bad ratios with the size of the animal. I mean, for fuck's sake, tattoo artists already practice on pig skin. Pigs would have been a better analogue, but honestly, they should have picked the millions of humans who were already tattooing themselves.

Of course, if they did that, they wouldn't get the same result and be able to push this sensationalist science news title, now would they? Except, in this case, we've gone from research paper to straight to sensationalist news title in one step! Just let the institute PR department push the narrative for you, without having to wait for that pesky news cycle to crawl through the telephone game.

https://mander.xyz/post/13003251

In the study the longest they waited after tattooing the mouse before giving the vaccine was 2 months.

They made some connections with people that had tattoos for a much longer time. But I can't tell how meaningful those connections are.

This is well outside of my field.

Edit:

Also, it sounds like the tattooed mice were less responsive to the covid vaccine but more responsive to the Influenza vaccine.

thats why some people get a rash at the tattoo sites, or it triggers shingles. make sense since macrophages clean up melanin pigment produced by post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, a brown spot after a severe pimple or something.