Journey

Abstract: We performed a retrospective analysis spanning ten years of pediatric practice focused on patients with variable vaccination born into a practice, presenting a unique opportunity to study the effects of variable vaccination on outcomes.

The average total incidence of billed office visits per outcome related to the outcomes were compared across groups (Relative Incidence of Office Visit (RIOV)). RIOV is shown to be more powerful than odds ratio of diagnoses. Full cohort, cumulative incidence analyses, matched for days of care, and matched for family history analyses were conducted across quantiles of vaccine uptake. Increased office visits related to many diagnoses were robust to days-ofcare-matched analyses, family history, gender block, age block, and false discovery risk.

Many outcomes had high RIOV odds ratios after matching for days-of-care (e.g., anemia (6.334), asthma (3.496), allergic rhinitis (6.479), and sinusitis (3.529), all significant under the Z-test).

Developmental disorders were determined to be difficult to study due to extremely low prevalence in the practice, potentially attributable to high rates of vaccine cessation upon adverse events and family history of autoimmunity.

Remarkably, zero of the 561 unvaccinated patients in the study had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared to 5.3% of the (partially and fully) vaccinated.

The implications of these results for the net public health effects of whole population vaccination and with respect for informed consent on human health are compelling.

Our results give agency to calls for research conducted by individuals who are independent of any funding sources related to the vaccine industry. While the low rates of developmental disorders prevented sufficiently powered hypothesis testing, it is notable that the overall rate of autism spectrum disorder (0.361%) in the cohort is one-fifth that of the US national rate (1.851%). The practice-wide rate of ADHD was roughly half of the national rate.

The data indicate that unvaccinated children in the practice are not unhealthier than the vaccinated and indeed the overall results may indicate that the unvaccinated pediatric patients in this practice are healthier overall than the vaccinated.

1. CDCa. Data and Statistics about ADHD. Available online: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html ⁽⁰⁸⁾
2. CDCb. Data & Statistics on Autism Spectrum Disorder. Available online: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html ⁽⁰⁹⁾

Conclusions We could detect no widespread negative health effects in the unvaccinated other than the rare but significant vaccine-targeted diagnosis. We can conclude that the unvaccinated children in this practice are not, overall, less healthy than the vaccinated and that indeed the vaccinated children appear to be significantly less healthy than the unvaccinated.

We concur with Mawson et al., 2017 ⁽¹⁰⁾ who reported: “Further research involving larger, independent samples is needed to verify and understand these unexpected findings in order to optimize the impact of vaccines on children’s health.”

We also concur with Hooker and Miller 2020 ⁽¹¹⁾, who wrote: “Further study is necessary to understand the full spectrum of health effects associated with childhood vaccination”.

Other pediatric practices with variably vaccinating populations should be studied using a methodology similar to ours to attempt to refute or validate our findings and those of Mawson et al., 2017, Hooker and Miller 2020, and the numerous studies that have reported adverse health following vaccination. We are particularly interested in further study of the relationship between specific vaccines and combination of vaccines on specific outcomes as well as the relationship between the uptake of specific types of vaccines—inactivated, live virus, and aluminum-adjuvanted—with specific outcomes. Larger studies using electronic medical records from major medical institutions should be undertaken by research teams with no financial interest in the outcome of the studies (e.g., revenue from vaccination and from treatment of vaccine-related adverse outcomes).

Unintended and nonspecific consequences of vaccination, such as increased risk of chronic health conditions from vaccine exposures, must also be examined to determine if for any vaccine-targeted infection alternative methods of infection-avoidance or effective treatments that reduce disease sequela are available and preferable to vaccination in various circumstances, as has been reported by Cowling et al., 2012 ⁽¹²⁾ and by Wolff (Wolff, 2020). Our findings are consistent with the concern that vaccination may increase respiratory virus infection risk, clearly a grave concern in the age of COVID-19.

Our finding of a robust signal of anemia deserves follow up: aluminum is known to bind to transferrin ⁽¹³⁾ and, in so doing, may interfere with the proper deposition of iron in the bones of children. Iron deficiency can also contribute to febrile seizures, a known side effect of some vaccines.

Our society should work to identify safer vaccine schedules and safer adjuvants ^{(14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22)} and to reduce autoimmunity risk by removing unsafe epitopes—peptide sequences from pathogens or human cell line remnants in vaccines that match human proteins in sequence or structure from any tissue ⁽²³⁾ —would seem expeditious, kind, and wise.

Future studies should now focus on the relative incidence of billed office visits, now that it has been shown to be a more sensitive and powerful measure of outcomes with a larger dynamic range than binary yes/no incidence of diagnoses.