THEY TRIED TO HIDE IT: A major childhood vaccine study accidentally sees the light of day

And what the authors found is a damning indictment of childhood vaccination

There have been several large cohort studies by paediatricians in recent years that purport to show an increased health burden in children who are vaccinated. One study that included 3,324 children, very publicly retracted but later reinstated after it was revealed that there were nothing more than two minor numerical or calculation errors in the abstract, showed vaccinated children not only had higher incidence rates for a range of health disorders, but also that they consume greater amounts of health service resources (in doctors visits) than their unvaccinated peers. Another looked at nearly 700 homeschooling children and found increased incidence of pneumonia, ear infections, allergies and neurodevelopmental disorders at rates of up to 660% higher in vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids.

The study attached below was done by the Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) and includes over 18,400 kids - a reasonably large cohort to evaluate. If nothing else, it is a damning indictment on childhood vaccination that (almost) nobody has ever seen. But everyone should read.

Entered Into Hearing Record Impact Of Childhood Vaccination On Short And Long Term Chronic Health Outcomes In Children A Birth Cohort Study

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HFHS are pro-pharma and pro-vaccines and had the study shown vaccines worked or were beneficial, we can be certain they would have flown this study from every flag pole and media outlet in the world.

Instead... they buried it so deep very few people have found it. When they got called out for burying it the senior medics in charge of HFHS decided at first to say their staff didn’t do the study at all... And then, when it recently came before the US Senate, the same senior medics changed gears and claimed they didn’t publish it because it was flawed. Many of us might agree that it was flawed... but WHY it is flawed is interesting and actually speaks to the issues we raise about how chronically negligent and misguided the pro-vaccine lobby is. Also, as you will see, the flaws don’t invalidate the conclusions we can draw from the data in the way the HFHS senior pro-vaccine and pro-pharma doctors would like you to believe.

The “Flaws”

First, we are told that the study is tilted heavily in favour of diagnosing the vaccinated children. Why? Because vaccinated children see a doctor more frequently. But why do they see a doctor more frequently? Because their parents take them in like pets to receive their ‘shots’. This, we are told by pro-vaccine media articles quoting people like Dr Jake Scott, must naturally bias the number of diagnoses in favour of vaccinated children because every trip to a doctor becomes an opportunity for a diagnosis requiring more expensive medical and pharmaceutical treatment. The null hypothesis to this must surely be that parents who don’t vaccinate are also not taking their children to the doctor when they are seriously unwell.

But this argument is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy with a twist that the apparently pharma-owned and clueless Dr Jake Scott couldn’t manage to see. What do I mean by this? Consider the following statement: The leading cause of death is doctors. Then ask yourself: Is this because a doctor is the person who pronounces death or is it because a doctor is the person treating the patient when they die irrespective of whether the doctor is highly skilled and acting properly at the time, pharma corrupted, or simply negligent? I would argue based on experience that even parents who don’t vaccinate their children would take their kid to the doctor if they had any of the serious medical conditions evaluated in the HFHS study, and the study’s data when analysed with more information bears my contention out.

Google’s (useless) AI tells us that studies across America report that the percentage of unvaccinated children in America is between 0.5% and 1.1%.

Figure 1: Google AI’s response

I think this value is likely quite low. Low enough to be incredible. Pro-vaccine politicians in Michigan, the US state where HFHS is based, exaggerate the unvaccinated number for adolescents as somewhere between 20% and 25% (here) when trying to coax more parents to offer up their children’s arms. Michigan’s immunisation scorecard that the politicians should be using is confusing, but puts kindergarten and school age vaccination rates as high as 90% (meaning an approximately 10% unvaccinated rate) based on Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR) data, and when averaging across multiple datasets for school-aged kids at 85% (meaning an approximately 15% unvaccinated rate).

Figure 2: Extract from Michigan Immunisation Scorecard

With these figures in mind we look at the HFHS study and find that 11% of the children included in the study are unvaccinated - slightly higher than the low end of the MCIR school/childcare value. This tells me that parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are not as irresponsible or flakey as people like Dr Jake Scott like to make out. Generally, they are taking unwell children to the doctor when they are truly unwell and are not trying to treat significant mental health, neurodevelopmental, endocrinal or autoimmune disorders at home through re-aligning the children’s shakras or homeopathy.

Second, we are told to discount the study because vaccinated children were followed longer - twice as long, according to Dr Jake Scott - as unvaccinated children. His argument is that the neurodevelopmental disorders, only one arm of the study, are most often only identified after the age of four - and that you don’t see what you aren’t looking for.

I think the man doth protest too much. The study itself is retrospective - meaning they are not ‘following patients as things happen’ (i.e. a prospective study). Rather, they are looking back at the patient records to see what happened and was recorded therein during a defined period. Okay… so let’s look at what the defined period was:

Figure 3: Study Design from Lamerato et al.

On even a critical read of the study design, vaccinated and unvaccinated children’s health records were treated identically.

Figure 4: Study Population from Lamerato et al.

This is true for the study population definition as well.

The only part of the study where we see any suggestion that there was a difference in the length of time participants were studied is in the sensitivity analysis section, where the authors are very clear about having undertaken appropriate statistical measures to correct for the difference observed in unvaccinated children.

Figure 5: Sensitivity Analysis from Lamerato et al.

But again, I ask you to think more broadly about this. Vaccinated children in the study had a median number of 18 vaccinations over the duration of the study (up to five years). This means that even if a vaccinated child had no other interactions with the health service, they would have a record spanning multiple appointments every year for most, if not all, of five years.

An unvaccinated child only interacted with the health service when they were unwell. This means it was possible for an unvaccinated child to never need to interact with the health service once they were discharged after birth. It also means the core of Dr Jake Scott’s argument here is that he discredits the absence of more interactions in the unvaccinated child’s health record by blaming the unvaccinated child for their good fortune to be healthy. That is, for having exactly what the study found overall - far fewer chronic or serious health conditions.

Is Dr Jake Scott arguing that the unvaccinated children’s requirement for far fewer doctors appointments because they were not getting vaccinated in a pro-vaccine health service is a conspiracy of poor follow-up on the part of the study’s authors? Is he suggesting that the authors failed to review the medical records for a long enough catchment period? Does he imply that the parents of all the unvaccinated children simply withdrew them from this healthcare provider at a rate far in excess of the vaccinated ones? Maybe he means to suggest that if only the children had more apparently unnecessary doctors’ appointments they would also have had similarly high levels of chronic and debilitating diagnoses?

I think this last contention is the one that gets us closer to the most obvious answer. If, as the data shows, unvaccinated children have far fewer chronic, neurological and serious health conditions they would need fewer doctors appointments and therefore while still being enrolled at or insured with the health provider, would have a far longer period between doctors visits.

QED: When you base your inclusion period on the last time they saw the doctor many of the unvaccinated children might appear to be enrolled in the study for a much shorter period when they are, in fact, nothing more than healthy kids with none of the listed health conditions you are looking for. Therefore, you can still safely be comparing apples with apples for the whole five year period and, I am sorry Dr Jake Scott, what you would be seeing is not a study flawed by unequal followup times. Rather, you are simply seeing that unvaccinated kids aren’t having as many health issues as their vaccinated peers.

Third, while being reported first, Dr Jake Scott’s final last-gasp argument is that the vaccination group is confounded by being much more diverse racially and in other ways, and by having more premature births and respiratory distress.

These arguments might have some superficial appeal when we look at the statistics - but primarily on a relative risk ratio (RR) rather than an actual risk (AR) one. Premature birth in the vaccinated cohort (Any Vaccine) was 4% (actual) or 300% (relative) higher. Similarly, respiratory distress was 3% (actual) or 400% (relative) higher. And there are differences in both directions for the ethnic groupings. The important thing to note is that the study’s authors show that despite the P-values of each of these differences being so low (<0.001) - because some slight differences would be expected in any comparator groups, especially those that are non-random as in a study like this that is looking at actual values in a total population rather than crafting researcher-managed population-matched and heavily curated cohorts - they are not significant in terms of explanatory power for the differences in health outcomes observed.

Figure 6: Demographics Table from Lamerato et al.

Further, incidence rates for the different medical conditions are reported in incidence per patient years - which the authors state in the sensitivity analysis section (reproduced as Figure 4, above) were computed by comparing patients from both cohorts enrolled in the study for 1-year, 3-years and 5-years. This means rates of disease are reported by an equal measure for the reader to compare and contrast, even though the original cohort sizes observed in the data were unequal. The authors also make a point of stating at the bottom of Page 12 that their results come after they controlled for gender, race, birth-weight, prematurity and other factors - completely mitigating Dr Jake Scott’s third claimed flaw.

Figure 7: Incidence Table from Lamerato et al.

The Findings

In round numbers, vaccinated children were shown to be over:

• 400% more likely to have an Asthma diagnosis and 600% more likely to have had an acute asthma attack

• 600% more likely to have acute and chronic ear infections

• 600% more likely to have an autoimmune disorder

• 800% more likely to have had an anaphylactic (serious allergic) event

Overall the authors report a 250% (2.5-fold) increased risk of developing a chronic health condition in children who receive childhood vaccinations when compared to children who remain unvaccinated. This is consistent with other vaccinated versus unvaccinated comparator studies - both those that Big Pharma and the industrial medical complex have forced into retraction, and those that remain.

Curiously, while several neurodevelopmental and endocrinal disorders were observed to affect some of the over 16,500 vaccinated children - ADHD (12.1%), Autism (1.1%), Diabetes (1.7%), Behavioural Disability (7.6%), Learning Disability (3.0%) and Tics (2.1%), the authors found no incidence of these disorders in the almost 2,000 unvaccinated children in their study. This too is something observed in the studies I cited in the opening paragraph of this article.

That said, I think it is a bit premature to make the claim that vaccines are the sole cause of every incident of these disorders, but it does strongly suggest one of three possible positions. Either: (i) that there may be some increased susceptibility in today’s children that vaccines might activate; (ii) that vaccines might somehow make children more susceptible to them and something else in the environment activates the condition; or (iii) that something about vaccines on their own can cause these conditions in children. In any event, whether one, more or none of these positions is correct is not something I could really make a call on from the data I have access to at this time.