This is going around the interwebz

Suspicions have been confirmed for those wary of vaccinating their children. A recent large study corroborates other independent study surveys comparing unvaccinated children to vaccinated children.

They all show that vaccinated children have two to five times more childhood diseases, illnesses, and allergies than unvaccinated children. Continued...

http://www.naturalnews.com/036220_vacci ... z1yFQ4eOZN

You heard it here first folks - bedwetting is a disease.

I suspect there is a procedural aspect here as idjit anti-vax don't go to doctors so what is reported??? nada

Original paper here

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057555/

Concludes the opposite.

The prevalence of allergic diseases and non-specific infections in children and adolescents was not found to depend on vaccination status.

My conclusion is that the arseholes who wrote the Natural News article are despicable cunts, as are the utter berks who are buying into said dreck. And no, I am not really saying what I feel like saying.

I will do a detailed debunking tomorrow. A bit late now.

Here we go again.

GenesForLife wrote:I will do a detailed debunking tomorrow. A bit late now.

Look forward to it, this is bound to be shoved down my throat soon.

GenesForLife wrote:Original paper here

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057555/

Concludes the opposite.

The prevalence of allergic diseases and non-specific infections in children and adolescents was not found to depend on vaccination status.

My conclusion is that the arseholes who wrote the Natural News article are despicable cunts, as are the utter berks who are buying into said dreck. And no, I am not really saying what I feel like saying.

I think your post is a bit confusing, and seems to suggest that this is the paper they are actually referring to in the Nature News article. Rather, that article simply reports surveys done by anti-vax organizations of their own members! By all means, provide us with your detailed debunking if you wish, GenesForLife. But is should be blatantly obvious what is wrong with a "study" like this:

Perhaps the most informal grass-roots survey going on now is by Tim O'Shea, DC, author of Vaccination is Not Immunization. He simply has non-vaccinating parents email him with comparisons of their children's health to friends and families they know with vaccinated children. That and more is available on his site.

Same shit as the homeopathetics trot out to "show" their mystic shit has 'scientific proof'. Pick some study that's distantly related and just claim it supports what you want it to, assuming the audience couldn't be arsed following up.

Lying for homeopathy?

What you mean a study that involves participants volunteering to be included might be Biased?

Say it ain't so!

I think your post is a bit confusing, and seems to suggest that this is the paper they are actually referring to in the Nature News article. Rather, that article simply reports surveys done by anti-vax organizations of their own members! By all means, provide us with your detailed debunking if you wish, GenesForLife. But is should be blatantly obvious what is wrong with a "study" like this:

I was referring to this bit in particular from their article.

Originally, the recent still ongoing study compared unvaccinated children against a German national health survey conducted by KiGGS involving over 17,000 children up to age 19.

The dubious nature of their study lies in the fact they used the KiGGS as a standard, despite the fact that the standard itself showed conclusions that were opposite. A clear sign of mendacity to use control studies and then ignore the fact that the control refutes your test hypothesis, isn't it?

GenesForLife wrote:

I think your post is a bit confusing, and seems to suggest that this is the paper they are actually referring to in the Nature News article. Rather, that article simply reports surveys done by anti-vax organizations of their own members! By all means, provide us with your detailed debunking if you wish, GenesForLife. But is should be blatantly obvious what is wrong with a "study" like this:

I was referring to this bit in particular from their article.

Originally, the recent still ongoing study compared unvaccinated children against a German national health survey conducted by KiGGS involving over 17,000 children up to age 19.

The dubious nature of their study lies in the fact they used the KiGGS as a standard, despite the fact that the standard itself showed conclusions that were opposite. A clear sign of mendacity to use control studies and then ignore the fact that the control refutes your test hypothesis, isn't it?

Yes. Thanks for clarifying that, I understand now. The also mention that "this currently ongoing survey study was initiated by classical homoeopathist Andreas Bachmair", which further creates the misimpression that the results support their beliefs. (Bachmair's name does not appear in the reference you provided, so I'm not sure what they means by him "initiating" it).

So dead children and children with Polio is OK? And isn't cyanide natural? Has smallpox already been forgotten?

What has basically happened, Shrunk, is that they've taken stats of how often vaccinated children fall sick from KiGGS as a representative of illness rates in vaccinated populations in general, ignored the KiGGS findings that there is no statistically significant difference in allergy and infectious disease rates for which vaccines are not available relative to unvaccinated children, and have asked american anti-vaxxers (or those moronic enough to visit their sites) to answer a questionnaire about how often their kids fall sick. Then, they have come out with the claim that allergy rates, for instance, are 500% higher in vaccinated children. They have also ignored the fact that KiGGS showed that there was a statistically significant difference in vaccine-preventable illnesses between the two populations.

Even a complete muppet can see the obvious, glaring flaw in the study design of these anti-vax muppets - the difference seen between the German population and those outside can be due to anything that is different between the two populations. To portray results from a "study" as pathetically controlled for confounding as this makes me weep.

Confirmation bias writ large.

chairman bill wrote:Lying for homeopathy?

Works for jeebus. Why not?

Of course, none of these studies were picked up by the MSM (mainstream media). None were funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO) or any national or international health agency or medical profession group

Therefore it must be true. What a plot!

Here goes...

The survey they talk about, that was supposedly set off by a “classical homeopathist” (as opposed to what exactly?) compares volunteers who answer surveys on various anti-vax sites against data from the German KiGGS study. Anybody with elementary training in epidemiology can see the immediate problem this poses – to facilitate a direct comparison between two variables or two groups that vary by a single factor, all other factors need to be randomised so they appear in similar frequencies in both populations. The only thing that can be legitimately compared to the vaccinated children in the KiGGS cohort is the unvaccinated children in the KiGGS cohort, and when this was done, the results debunked the very premise of the drivel in question. ( KiGGS original paper can be found here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057555/ )

To quote

“The prevalence of allergic diseases and non-specific infections in children and adolescents was not found to depend on vaccination status.”

and worse for the anti-vaxxers, they did find a statistically significant difference in the occurrence of vaccine-preventable illnesses. (See graph below)



Note that a p-value of less than 0.05 is a statistically significant result, and in all the other analyses carried out, there was no statistically significant results indicating that allergies and chronic illnesses are higher in vaccinated people.

Now, having taken care of the excuse for a study that seeks to compare data against the KiGGS study, let us look at some of the others that have been quoted by the article in question.

[1] The IAS survey they refer to has no P.values, meaning that it is impossible to verify if the differences they found were statistically significant or not. Of course, the study itself is moot in light of large scale meta-analyses that have found no evidence that vaccinated children have higher rates of chronic conditions, infectious or otherwise. See the discussion section of the KiGGS paper for associated literature that showed no evidence for such a link.

[2] The study in Christchurch they refer to (Kemp et al) could not rule out differential reporting as a cause of differences.

To quote http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9345669
“These findings do not appear to be due to differential use of health services (although this possibility cannot be excluded) or con-founding by ethnicity,socioeconomic status, parental atopy, or parental smoking.”

Of course, yet more meta-analyses have found no statistically significant link at all between vaccination and asthma http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/c ... 1269.short

While one or two studies have pointed to a link between whole-cell pertussis vaccine and increased risk of allergy, there are acellular vaccines available, and with re-emergence of whooping cough, partly with the increased prevalence of unvaccinated children, death by whooping cough is not an option.

http://www.immunizationinfo.org/vaccine ... ping-cough

Some of the egregious piffle on the site, such as trying to insinuate there is some sort of stupid conspiracy theory against the Bachmair “study”, which was the first thing I dealt with for flaws in study design because people daren’t compare the health of vaccinated against unvaccinated children really takes the cake. The studies that led to the replacement of whole-cell pertussis vaccine with acellular vaccines all appeared in conventional scientific journals, and by insinuating that studies funded by the WHO are somehow biased, the article makes potentially libellous accusations, as well as committing the fallacy of poisoning the well.

If they can produce proper data and get it published, they will have something valid to contribute to discourse on vaccines, otherwise they can, and should, sod off in my humble opinion.

As for Obukhanych, maybe she would be well advised to go back in history and examine the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine, which obviously was in action long before big pharma, the favourite punching bag in the wet dreams of every anti-vaxxer was around. More recently, one can point to solid evidence that vaccines work, even in extremely high-risk populations, even when examined using double blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials, like this http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NE ... 0093031501

Vaccines clearly reduce the occurrence of the diseases they are designed to immunize people against. And that, it would appear, is the end of that.

And finally, for O’Shea’s “grassroots survey”, even schoolchildren can carry out more rigorous, well-controlled research http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/168 , there is clearly no standardization involved in asking parents of unvaccinated children to compare their own kids with vaccinated children of friends and family, especially because anti-vaxxers, as evident from the bilge that characterises the comments on that thread, might hold the belief that their children are somehow healthier a priori, and in the absence of rigorous data-collection, this can introduce bias.

* A copy of this also appeared on my blog.

Excellent work GFL
Ammunition for those that have to fight this nonsense regularly.