Are unvaccinated children more healthy than vaccin

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Are unvaccinated children more healthy than vaccinated children?

Posted by Orac on October 21, 2016

scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/10/21/are-unvaccinated-children-more-healthy-than-vaccinated-children/



There are many myths that undergird anti-vaccine beliefs, such as the myth that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, and basically anything anti-vaccinationists like to blame on them.

Basically, if you believe anti-vaccinationists, there’s nothing bad that vaccines can’t do to children. The flip side of this myth is perhaps the central myth of the antivaccine movement, which is that unvaccinated children are somehow so much healthier than vaccinated children and that fewer vaccines equates to better health.

This one pops up time after time after time after time. It is also the central motivating belief behind frequent calls by antivaccine activists for a “vaccinated versus unvaccinated” study. These calls began with proposals for—I kid you not—a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children.

When it was pointed out that such a trial would be completely unethical because it lacks clinical equipoise and that message finally sank in, antivaccinationists pivoted to wanting an epidemiological “vaxed versus unvaxed” study, even though the expense and challenges of such a study would be monumental and antivaccinationists wouldn’t believe a negative outcome anyway.

Of course, these “minor” setbacks haven’t deterred antivaccine advocates from trying to make their case. I remember the first time I saw it, now many years ago, when J.B. Handley and Generation Rescue actually paid a company to do a telephone survey on the health of unvaccinated children. Let’s just say that the design of the survey and wording of the questions were…not exactly rigorous.

Hilariously, though, the survey actually showed some groups of vaccinated children were healthier than unvaccinated children. Even though it was a worthless telephone survey whose results meant nothing, it was hard not to laugh at how it backfired on Generation Rescue.

And don’t get me started on an Internet survey administered by a German homeopath that didn’t show what he thought it showed. He wasn’t the first. Others followed. All generated data (if you can call it that) that turned out to be—surprise!—utterly worthless and unsupportive of the hypothesis that unvaccinated children are generally healthier.

They do provide me with fun targets at which to direct some Insolence, though, along with opportunities to point out that the vaccine schedule is not only evidence-based, but safe and effective.

I was reminded of the “healthy unvaccinated child” myth last night when I came across a post on a website known as Stop Mandatory Vaccination. You can tell there’s going to be a lot of misinformation there when you see its tagline: “Vaccines don’t save lives, healthy immune systems do!” The post is entitled We Have Healthy Vaccine Free Children which basically aggregates comments made after a post on the group’s Facebook page:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/10/21/...-children/

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