Formal Debate Thread: Unvaccinated children are healthier than fully vaccinated children - READ... - Page 2

[ma2two]

A large scale scientific study would be an excellent way to answer this question. Unfortunately, the government has refused to fund any such study. That's why the National Vaccine Information Center will be doing one, but it will be a long time before the results are in.

"We are not going to wait any longer for government or industry to answer the big question of whether the nearly 70 doses of 16 vaccines that doctors now give our children between the day of birth and age 18 is contributing to the unexplained chronic disease and disability epidemic that is harming far too many of our children. With 1 child in 6 now learning disabled; 1 in 9 asthmatic; 1 in 100 developing autism; 1 in 450 diabetic and millions more suffering with seizures, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, bi-polar disorder and other chronic illness, the National Vaccine Information Center is assembling a group of independent experts from multiple scientific disciplines to immediately evaluate and act to protect our children’s health.

NVIC’s Children’s Fund for Hope, Health and Healing will raise funds to first create data collection systems and conduct small preliminary studies with a longer term goal of conducting a large 10-year clinical study. The scientific research program will evaluate health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; identify potential high risk factors for adverse responses to vaccination; and investigate the biological mechanisms for vaccine injury and death."

http://www.nvic.org/NVIC-Vaccine-News/October-2009/NVIC-Launches-Research-Fund-To-Study-Health-Vacc.aspx

[stik]

The vaccineinjury.info survey has been under discussion in another thread today.  One doesn't get a representative sample of children by asking people to respond to a poll on a website whose name has the words vaccine injury in the URL.  You tend to get a lot of parents who feel their children have suffered from vaccines and virtually no one else.  And indeed, the "results" page for the survey notes:

Most of the participants only received 1-3 vaccinations followed by 4-6 vaccinations. Reason is that most parents stopped vaccinating after side effects occured(see chart above).

http://www.vaccineinjury.info/results-vaccinated/results-general.html

These are not typical vaccinated children, most of whom receive more than 6 vaccinations as part of the routine childhood series. 

Pers did a lovely job examining the issues in this source earlier today.  You can see her discussion here: http://www.mothering.com/community/t/1355734/vaccinated-children-have-2-5-times-more-diseases-and-disorders#post_17013776
 

[AdinaL]

Originally Posted by Imakcerka 

Can I just start by saying I'm at a loss on this one.  I have looked everywhere and what I have found is evenly split.  This is going to be a tough one.  I'm looking for all illnesses.  All things you may go to the Dr. for.  And I know you said non neuro Adina but everything I've looked at so far throws it all in together and it's very hard to ignore parts of it.  Ya know?  I'll be back.  Either way this is a very good start in my opinion.

Interesting. If the studies are all thrown together, that is another issue. Let's just not focus on neuro at this point, it may be that we have to take the conversation that way.

[Rrrrrachel]

Originally Posted by ma2two 

A large scale scientific study would be an excellent way to answer this question. Unfortunately, the government has refused to fund any such study. That's why the National Vaccine Information Center will be doing one, but it will be a long time before the results are in.

"We are not going to wait any longer for government or industry to answer the big question of whether the nearly 70 doses of 16 vaccines that doctors now give our children between the day of birth and age 18 is contributing to the unexplained chronic disease and disability epidemic that is harming far too many of our children. With 1 child in 6 now learning disabled; 1 in 9 asthmatic; 1 in 100 developing autism; 1 in 450 diabetic and millions more suffering with seizures, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, bi-polar disorder and other chronic illness, the National Vaccine Information Center is assembling a group of independent experts from multiple scientific disciplines to immediately evaluate and act to protect our children’s health.

NVIC’s Children’s Fund for Hope, Health and Healing will raise funds to first create data collection systems and conduct small preliminary studies with a longer term goal of conducting a large 10-year clinical study. The scientific research program will evaluate health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; identify potential high risk factors for adverse responses to vaccination; and investigate the biological mechanisms for vaccine injury and death."

http://www.nvic.org/NVIC-Vaccine-News/October-2009/NVIC-Launches-Research-Fund-To-Study-Health-Vacc.aspx

I've already posted three relevant actual real life studies.

[Just1More]

Originally Posted by stik 

The vaccineinjury.info survey has been under discussion in another thread today.  One doesn't get a representative sample of children by asking people to respond to a poll on a website whose name has the words vaccine injury in the URL.  You tend to get a lot of parents who feel their children have suffered from vaccines and virtually no one else.  And indeed, the "results" page for the survey notes:

http://www.vaccineinjury.info/results-vaccinated/results-general.html

These are not typical vaccinated children, most of whom receive more than 6 vaccinations as part of the routine childhood series. 

Pers did a lovely job examining the issues in this source earlier today.  You can see her discussion here: http://www.mothering.com/community/t/1355734/vaccinated-children-have-2-5-times-more-diseases-and-disorders#post_17013776
 

Thanks.  That answered that.  Sorry for not being up on the other threads.  I'll work on it. (No snark intended.  I'm serious.  It's hard to jump in here, but I am totally interested in reviving this part of mothering.  I loved the vax threads that got into the nitty gritty.)

[purslaine]

Originally Posted by Rrrrrachel 

  One study in Germany even showed the incidence of various non-vaccine related infections were LOWER in vaccinated children.  (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11023764)  

This is quite unscientific as well.  The abstract says it asked mothers to fill in a diary.

 It also says vaxxed were described as infants receiving first vaccines on day 60 , while unvaxxed were those who received first vaccine at 90 days.  Did the mothers just fill in a diary for a month???

[stik]

Originally Posted by Rrrrrachel 


I've already posted three relevant actual real life studies.

I especially like the Danish study you linked in your first post on this thread (it was the JAMA link).  This study compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children to test the hypothesis that vaccines weaken the immune system by over-loading it.  The results suggest that vaccinated children are less vulnerable to non-targeted infectious diseases (things that are not VPDs) than unvaccinated children:

During 2 900 463 person-years of follow-up, 84 317 cases of infectious disease hospitalization were identified. Out of 42 possible associations (6 vaccines and 7 infectious disease categories), the only adverse association was for Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine and acute upper respiratory tract infection (rate ratio, 1.05; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.08 comparing vaccinated participants with unvaccinated participants). This one adverse association of 42 possible outcomes was within the limits of what would be expected by chance alone and the effect was not temporal or dose-response. When considering aggregated vaccine exposure, we found no adverse associations between an increasing number of vaccinations and infectious diseases.

- http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?volume=294&issue=6&page=699

This was a substantially-sized observational study on a clearly identifiable population cohort.  This is the kind of work that NVIC is talking about funding in the link a few posts back.  It's neat to see that this has already been done in Denmark. 

[Rrrrrachel]

Aaaand what's unscientific about that?

[purslaine]

Originally Posted by Rrrrrachel 

Several studies show that there is not a higher incidence of various infections in recently vaccinated children  (http://www.aerzteblatt.de/pdf/DI/108/7/m99.pdf). 

The study only had 92 unvaccinated kids.

That being said, I thought some of it was interesting.

While, not surprisingly, VPD rates were higher among the unvaxxed (they were high, period, much higher than one would expect in North America) other infections were a little lower.  

"Relative to the year preceding the KiGGS survey, children aged 1–5 years had the highest numbers of in- fections. The median number in unvaccinated subjects was 3.3 (95% CI 2.1 to 4.6) and in vaccinated ones, 4.2 (95% CI 54.1 to 4.4). For 6–10-year-olds, the numbers were 3.0 (95% CI 0.4 to 5.7) in unvaccinated subjects and 2.9 (95% CI 2.7 to 3.0) in vaccinated subjects. In 11–17-year-olds, the median number of infections was 1.9 (95% CI 1.0 to 2.8) and 2.2 (95% CI 2.1 to 2.3) (Figure 2)."

Looking at the averages between the 3 age groups,  allergies seemed to be higher overall in the vaxxed,  excema was a tie, and asthma was definitely higher in the vaxxed,  however the number of unvaxxed individuals  really are so small - I am hesitant to draw any conclusions.  Table 2, page 102.

I really do wish we had studies with  larger samples.  

[ma2two]

Originally Posted by stik 

I especially like the Danish study you linked in your first post on this thread (it was the JAMA link).  This study compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children to test the hypothesis that vaccines weaken the immune system by over-loading it.  The results suggest that vaccinated children are less vulnerable to non-targeted infectious diseases (things that are not VPDs) than unvaccinated children:

- http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?volume=294&issue=6&page=699

This was a substantially-sized observational study on a clearly identifiable population cohort.  This is the kind of work that NVIC is talking about funding in the link a few posts back.  It's neat to see that this has already been done in Denmark. 

This study the NVIC will do has not already been done. The study linked to above looked only at a specific set of infectious diseases. Not chronic disease and autoimmune disorders.

[MamaMunchkin]

On something related - I found a link on the demographics of children based on their vax status.  It's done by CDC, so for the US population.

The study is not about the relative health of the children per se but it turned out that the groups have other distinguishing features apart from the vax status. 

Why this may matter:

- it'd be interesting to compare the relative effects of vax status and these other traits to the overall health

- given any study comparing groups based on vax status, it might be important to find out how these other characteristics are handled. 

- another issue to ponder is how a study like this might influence CDC's rationale for vax recommendations

http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvaccinated-children

[stik]

The Denmark study had a HUGE cohort, but only dealt with infectious disease.  The Kiggs study conclusions state that no differences were observed in allergies or number of infections between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.  That was a pretty big study too.  n for unvaccinated children was small, but reflects prevalence in the German population.  The numbers of completely unvaccinated children in the US are small too - under 50,000.  Even if every child in the unvaccinated cohort could be persuaded to participate in a study, it's power to detect statistically significant differences between populations would be limited.  This page has a strong pro-vax bias and a decent explanation of the stats involved: http://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=154 

The link is focused on exploring the vaccines/autism connection, but the statistical problems created by a small population of non-vaxxers will hold true for studies of other correlates of vaccination.

[stik]

Originally Posted by ma2two 

This study the NVIC will do has not already been done. The study linked to above looked only at a specific set of infectious diseases. Not chronic disease and autoimmune disorders.

What will the NVIC study do that the Denmark study did not? 

[ma2two]

Originally Posted by stik 

What will the NVIC study do that the Denmark study did not? 

You just wrote in your previous post that it only looked at infectious diseases.

[Rrrrrachel]

Originally Posted by kathymuggle 

Originally Posted by Rrrrrachel 

Several studies show that there is not a higher incidence of various infections in recently vaccinated children  (http://www.aerzteblatt.de/pdf/DI/108/7/m99.pdf). 

The study only had 92 unvaccinated kids.

That being said, I thought some of it was interesting.

While, not surprisingly, VPD rates were higher among the unvaxxed (they were high, period, much higher than one would expect in North America) other infections were a little lower.  

"Relative to the year preceding the KiGGS survey, children aged 1–5 years had the highest numbers of in- fections. The median number in unvaccinated subjects was 3.3 (95% CI 2.1 to 4.6) and in vaccinated ones, 4.2 (95% CI 54.1 to 4.4). For 6–10-year-olds, the numbers were 3.0 (95% CI 0.4 to 5.7) in unvaccinated subjects and 2.9 (95% CI 2.7 to 3.0) in vaccinated subjects. In 11–17-year-olds, the median number of infections was 1.9 (95% CI 1.0 to 2.8) and 2.2 (95% CI 2.1 to 2.3) (Figure 2)."

Looking at the averages between the 3 age groups,  allergies seemed to be higher overall in the vaxxed,  excema was a tie, and asthma was definitely higher in the vaxxed,  however the number of unvaxxed individuals  really are so small - I am hesitant to draw any conclusions.  Table 2, page 102.

I really do wish we had studies with  larger samples.  

Kathy the way statistics works is you don't just look at the numbers and see which one is bigger. There is a thing called "inference" and it uses probability to determine whether differences are significant or just due to random variation. Here inference says the differences are too small to be significant.

[purslaine]

Originally Posted by stik 

The numbers of completely unvaccinated children in the US are small too - under 50,000.  Even if every child in the unvaccinated cohort could be persuaded to participate in a study, it's power to detect statistically significant differences between populations would be limited.  This page has a strong pro-vax bias and a decent explanation of the stats involved: http://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=154 

I think the number of unvaccinated kids is small, but not quite as small as some statistics I see floating around.  I imagine some complete non-vaxxers are somewhat underground.

In any event, using the stats that 3/1000 kids are unvaccinated from this mainstream site http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvaccinated-children, and  the census for 2010  (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html)   24% of the 310 000 000 American were under 18 - 74 400 000.  With the number of unvaccinated sitting at 1/333, the number of unvaccinated children and youth is 223 423.

I am not arguing to be difficult, I do think getting enough kids to participate in trials might be tricky, but I do not think the pool is quite as small as some say.

Edited by purslaine - 6/15/12 at 5:23am

[purslaine]

Originally Posted by Rrrrrachel 


Kathy the way statistics works is you don't just look at the numbers and see which one is bigger. There is a thing called "inference" and it uses probability to determine whether differences are significant or just due to random variation. Here inference says the differences are too small to be significant.

Italics mine.  

I like looking at the data rather than the conclusions.  The data is there for everyone to look at - and they can determine whether or not they (who are the parents making the decision) think the numbers are significant.

I don't see huge difference between the vaxxed and unvaxxed - but I do see slight ones.  

Edited by purslaine - 6/15/12 at 5:46am

[stik]

Originally Posted by ma2two 

You just wrote in your previous post that it only looked at infectious diseases.

Hazards of posting late at night.  The KiGGs study Rrrrachel posted deals with Allergic rhinoconjunctivitis, eczema, and asthma, and found no significant differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, with, as Kathymuggle noted, a really small n for unvaccinated children.  Recruiting a large unvaccinated study cohort is going to be tricky no matter who does it. We're leaving aside neurological issues for now, though those have also been studied.  So anything the proposed not-yet-funded NVIC comparative study could do for this discussion has been done.

[stik]

Originally Posted by kathymuggle 

Italics mine.  

I like looking at the data rather than the conclusions.  The data is there for everyone to look at - and they can determine whether or not they (who are the parents making the decision) think the numbers are significant.

I don't see huge difference between the vaxxed and unvaxxed - but I do see slight ones.  

How are you running your calculations for P value? 

[erigeron]

I too am curious about Kathy's statistical analysis methods.

I am not particularly crazy about this study, though. If you look at the methodology, kids who received no vaccinations are in the unvaxxed group, and kids who received any vaccinations at all are in the vaccinated group, so the vaccinated group is pretty heterogenous--it includes everything from kids who got one vax once on up to kids vaccinated fully on schedule. I think it's pretty meaningless to draw any conclusions on the basis of data from this group, at least pertaining to the topic of this thread. If someone is trying to argue that getting one vaccine once creates a problem, this data does argue against that theory, but this study does not compare unvaxxed kids to fully vaxxed kids. It compares unvaxxed kids to kids who got any, some, or all vaccinations.