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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34280 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Impact of Childhood Vaccination on Short and Long-Term Chronic Health Outcomes in Children: A Birth Cohort Study

Table of results

This testimony by Aaron Siri provides a useful contextualization and lay explanation of the study's methodology and findings. I've personally been skeptical of most anti-vax claims for awhile (sans the harms of COVID vaccines being used in young populations). It mostly seemed like a haze of memes with a high noise to signal ratio, but this study has changed my mind, at least for now. I'm not terribly familiar with this topic, so I looked for critiques of this study.

I found this guy's 2 minute critique. Here's the key points he makes:

  1. We know from "previous studies" that the smaller group of unvaccinated children is less likely to seek medical care. Because they will not have as many office visits, they won't have as many opportunities to receive a diagnosis.
  2. It's statistically impossible to have 2000 kids with 0 cases of ADHD because the national prevalence of ADHD is 10-11%. (Implicitly, therefore, something must be wrong with the study)
  3. A recent study of 1 million danish children, including 20,000 unvaxxed, found that vaccinated children were less likely to develop chronic diseases than unvaxxed children.

For point 1, the study already answers this, and it seems convincing enough to me:

In this study, exposed children had an average of 7 annual encounters, irrespective of having a chronic health condition. Unexposed children had an average of 2 annual encounters but an average of almost 5 annual encounters if diagnosed with a chronic health condition. This likely demonstrates that when a child had a medical condition, parents sought healthcare. In fact, many conditions evaluated in this study are serious and cannot be self-treated, such as asthma, diabetes, anaphylaxis or asthma attack, warranting urgent medical attention. We nonetheless conducted several sensitivity analyses to explore the influence of healthcare utilization in order to improve the internal validity of this study and minimize potential ascertainment bias. To ensure the unexposed group’s shorter follow-up duration did not influence the results, we repeated the Cox proportional hazards analysis for the chronic health composite outcome for those in the plan for one, three and five years and for those who had at least one healthcare encounter, which demonstrated results consistent with the overall findings. The association between vaccination and developing a chronic health condition was independent of these factors. Therefore, our findings do not appear to be due to differential use of health resources.

I would like to see how big the effect is from the "previous studies" as well

Point 2 seems weak to me. First, because almost all of the population receives childhood vaccinations, if vaccinations were causing ADHD, this is exactly what you would see. Second, this is one metric on which it makes sense that anti-vax parents would be less likely to bother with a diagnosis due to skepticism. ADHD is a very squishy diagnosis. The popular critique is that it is overdiagnosed, and that the expectations are at fault, not the child, because it is absurd to expect children to sit in a classroom for hours every day filling out paperwork without lashing out or being bored. This thinking would likely be popular among anti-vax parents. But, as the study itself notes, it's hard to see how this same logic would apply to something more clear-cut like asthma. On the other hand, I do have a hard time interpreting the apparently low incidence rate even among the vaccinated group. 262 cases/16,511 vaccinated = 1.6%. Perhaps this is due to a large portion of the study group being younger than 8 years old? This might be the main answer to the critique. The study claims to control for age when calculating hazard ratios so younger-bias this shouldn't affect the results (?)

Point 3 seems stronger to me, though it has some limitations. First, that study focused mostly on using aluminum content of the vaccine as a dependent variable. The various vaccines in the Denmark schedule can have a 2 to 10 fold difference in aluminum content, so if you're doing a regression, it would bias it towards being flat if aluminum is not doing anything, but something else about vaccination is (such as pure number of vaccines). A minor nitpick is that the MMR vaccine has 0 mg of aluminum per their supplementary table 2, so "children not vaccinated with any aluminum-adsorbed vaccines" is not quite the same as unvaccinated children. Denmark also only appears to have 5 vaccines in their schedule (just based on that supplement table), but the theory from RFK and friends seems to be something like vaccine overload. The Henry Ford study, by contrast says the median number of vaccinations in the exposed group is 18.

Does anyone know of any high quality deep dives into this or other similar studies which do not have any institutional bias? Is it vaporware, or is there something to this?

There are plenty of studies on the relationship between vaccines and atopic diseases like asthma. Some find an effect but nothing like a 4x factor. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36180331/

The study used in the hearing wasn't published. We can debate why that is, Siri argued that it was because they were afraid of losing their jobs. But plenty of scientists have published studies showing a correlation between vaccines and increased prevalence of various ailments.

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