We have been talking about childhood vaccines for a few days, and we do it because the measles outbreak that affects several US states, with 121 cases declared until February 6, has once again put a problem in the forefront. exists for a few years: many parents, more and more, they don't vaccinate their children.
The reasons for not vaccinating are several, but as a summary I would say that those who do not vaccinate consider that vaccines do not work, that they are toxic and that they are an invention of pharmaceutical companies to do direct business and also to do indirect business, that is, to weaken our children's immune system and make them forever sicker children who need to use more drugs.
Why do they say this? Among other things, because between 2003 and 2006 the KIGGS study was carried out in Germany, where data were obtained to compare vaccinated children with unvaccinated children and, according to anti-vaccines, it is said that unvaccinated children have Better health, suffer less infectious diseases and less allergies. It is true? Do unvaccinated children have better health than vaccinated children? Is it better not to vaccinate children? Let's talk about it.
Why are there parents who decide not to vaccinate
To place these anti-vaccine parents a bit, and as we have explained on other occasions and a few days ago in Xataka, the current fashion of not vaccinating (all life has been skeptical, but on a more global level it is relatively recent) born in 1998, when Dr. Andrew Wakefield published an article in the prestigious magazine The Lancet in which he explained that 12 children with autistic disorder suffered as a result of the Triple Viral vaccine of measles, rubella and mumps (mumps).
The article obviously made all the alarms go off and a revolution began in every way. The parents began to doubt about the vaccine and many refused to receive their children, health professionals began to doubt the vaccine they administered and many they started recommending not to do it and the parents of children with autism spectrum disorder began to tie ends: when they were under 12-15 months, when they were given the vaccine, they were fine, and began to notice symptoms after the vaccine. This, of course, does not mean anything, because before the age of the vaccine it is very difficult to diagnose children, so many would surely have ended up being with or without a vaccine.
Faced with such an alert, studies began to be carried out to confirm or deny the results, because non-vaccination put the population at risk again for those viruses, but vaccination, if it produced autism, was intolerable. The studies failed to repeat these results. and a journalist, Brian Deer, devoted his time to analyzing the study, the twelve cases and to uncover what was a great fraud. From 2003 to 2008, he published his conclusions and the answer was that Wakefield saw his medical license revoked in 2010 accused of lying, of generating a worldwide alarm that still continues today and of submitting 12 children with autism to invasive tests unnecessary, such as colonoscopies, lumbar punctures, etc., of which he then modified the results so that the study ended the conclusions he wanted. Magazine The Lancet He withdrew the article.
All the years that passed from the study until the lie was uncovered were enough to get doubts to grow and, once the damage was done, once the vaccine had a bad reputation, the possibility of convincing the entire population that it did not produce Autism no longer existed. Come on, that from the anti-vaccine movement they considered that everything was an attack on Wakefield, a montage of the pharmaceutical companies in order to silence the only man who had decided to say "the truth", and for that reason they now consider him almost as a hero.
The KIGGS study
Now that you know where the bulk of the anti-vaccine parents come from, know that since this has been the argument for non-vaccination for many years and against vaccines, they have been polishing, improving, and that many times they sound convincing. As vaccines are also manufactured by pharmaceutical multinationals, which often suffer from lack of ethics, it is easy for the population to write the message that "everything is an invention to ensure that our children have a worse health and so that so, be on your life using drugs. A great lie that we have been told, unnecessary, because if we did not get vaccinated our natural defenses would control viruses and, with contagion, we would be protected for life. "
But this is not true. Pharmacists don't make too much money with vaccines, really, but with everything else, and they don't have to put much effort into getting sick either, because we already do it alone: we are sedentary, we do less sport than we should, we eat worse than we should and many of us have extra pounds. We live stressed, unhappy with a life that seems to drag us, with the current account always under minimum and suffering because at work they have thrown a partner. Our children? Well the same. They get sick because we have to take them to the nursery to work, where they spread each other. Many also live stressed, with schedules that sometimes exceed those of adults. Then we spend money on medicines to be cured as soon as possible and also, on supplements and vitamins in case they take longer to fall ill again. And since we are, "Give me, Mr. Pharmacist, something for the spirit, that lately I am as if I were down." No man, no, what we alone are already self-sufficient when it comes to getting sick. We don't need anyone to make us sick.
And if that were the case, if the children got sicker with vaccines, it would look like in the KIGGS study, but it is not. The KIGGS study was carried out in Germany between 2003 and 2006 and it was attempted to know the state of health of children in the country, vaccinated or not vaccinated. Thanks to these data, in 2011, several researchers tried to answer the entry question, with the study we are going to mention today. Let us begin:
Babies are vaccinated from the age of two months and many parents fear that they will receive vaccinations at that age, and henceforth, may overload, stress or weaken the immune system. That is why they think that vaccinating a child is a mistake that he will pay for the rest of his life in the form of diseases, infections and allergies. To respond to these parents, the data from the health interview on childhood and adolescence (KIGGS) were used, where the parents explained which vaccines they carried and which they did not and which diseases they suffered and which they did not. A few days ago, a person declared anti-vaccinations made reference to the aforementioned study to give me data that showed that vaccinated children got sicker. It was not the first time that happened to me, so I realized that this survey is used by the anti-vaccinations to strengthen their arguments. The problem? That the study does not say what they proclaim.
Results of the KIGGS study analysis
For starters, just knowing that the study It is based on a survey and discards it at the scientific level. You cannot decide that vaccines are good, bad, better or worse based on what you ask the parents of the children, because each parent can say what seems best. In fact, he can even lie to you if he wants to. It's like when, to sell you a product, they tell you that 9 out of 10 people who have tried it would repeat. That says nothing. It is only the opinion about a product that does not have to be better than others.
For a study to be serious and can be taken into account you have to randomly take a group of children, divide it into two and vaccinate in half. The other half should also receive a vaccine, but of serum or some liquid that does nothing. A placebo. Neither children, nor parents, should know who has received the vaccine or medication. Researchers should analyze the results obtained, seeing which children get sick and which children do not and how the fluid they receive affects them. To be reliable, neither can researchers know which children receive a real vaccine and which children receive a lie vaccine, because if they know they can stop being objective and opt for one of the two sides (if the researcher is provaccines, tend to minimize the pathology in the vaccinated and maximize that of the unvaccinated). But of course, no ethics committee is going to allow anyone to do such a study, because you are stopping vaccinating some children whose parents probably would have wanted to vaccinate their children, and at the same time, you are exposing them to a preventable risk: "Look, it turns out that his son had to be one of those receiving placebo, and apparently he has taken measles and is going to have to be hospitalized." Come on It is a study that will never be done.
How then to know if vaccinated children have better or worse health than unvaccinated children? It can not. Unless the difference is very flagrant you cannot easily know. You can make estimates, you can do studies like the one mentioned, to get an idea, but in reality it is very difficult to eliminate the confounding factors and the mere fact that they are surveys takes away validity.
The interviews of the KIGGS study were made to a total of 17,641 children, but of them only 13,499 had a vaccination card (the others were probably vaccinated, but could not be confirmed). Of the children under analysis 13,359 were vaccinated and 94 were not. We have already said that as a study, because it is based on surveys, it does not work. But we go ahead to rename the whole issue. At this point we find the second problem: 94 unvaccinated children. More than 13,000 children against less than 100. The sample is too small, and because it is too small the results cannot be considered reliable. What if those 94 children barely get sick, but if they were 5,000 they were always very bad? And if it is the other way around, and in case of being 5,000 would they be even healthier than the 94?
But no matter, we move on. They compared the incidence of measles, rubella, mumps and pertussis, diseases far more dangerous than a flu or a cold and (the first on the forehead) saw that unvaccinated children became sicker than vaccinated children, as you can see in the following graph (in light color the prevalence of illness of the unvaccinated and in dark the prevalence of illness of children with enough vaccines to be protected):
Didn't they say they got less sick if they didn't get vaccinated? No. Of these diseases no, precisely because they are not vaccinated. And of the others? Well, let's see it. When asked about the diseases that had happened the previous year, children from 1 to 5 years not vaccinated suffered an average of 3.3 infections, by 4.2 vaccinated. Those from 6 to 10 years 3.0 the unvaccinated and 2.9 the vaccinated. Those aged 11 to 17, 1.9 those not vaccinated and 2.2 those vaccinated. You can see it in the following graphic:
The difference is not much in any of the groups, so the researchers concluded that there are no significant differences. So, more or less, they get sick the same way. Or not? Because parents who do not vaccinate their children often shy away from traditional medicine. They do not go to the doctor of a lifetime and instead go to homeopaths, healers, acupuncturists and other alternative therapists. Are they able to diagnose the disease? Because a doctor tells you that you have asthma, but a homeopath tells you that you have a cough, and it is not the same to say asthma than to say cough. A doctor tells you that you have a viral infection and depending on who you go to, he can tell you that it is not an infection, but what you have is the need for your energies to be rearranged. The first will say that he suffered an infection and the second will not.
But well, let's put this hypothesis aside and move on. To end the study, they looked at whether vaccinated children suffered more allergies than unvaccinated children and saw that in children aged 1 to 5 there were atopy disorders in 12.6% of those not vaccinated and 15% in those vaccinated In children aged 6 to 10, it was 30.1% in the unvaccinated and 24.4% in the vaccinated. In those aged 11 to 17, it was 20.3% in the unvaccinated and 29.9% in the vaccinated. The following graphic shows it:
Investigators concluded that the differences were not significantWell, despite the fact that in two age groups, the vaccinated had more atopy, in one of them, the unvaccinated suffered more. The difference, therefore, does not seem to come from being vaccinated or not.
In addition to all the above, they analyzed data on diseases such as bronchitis, pneumonia, otitis media, heart disease, anemia, epilepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and in all cases they saw that there were no differences between unvaccinated and vaccinated children.
At the moment, there are no differences
That is, when talking about the usual diseases in children, those of day to day, It is indifferent whether you vaccinate your child or not. It won't be healthier or less healthy because you do one thing or the other. Now, you are putting it at risk of diseases for which there is a vaccine. If the anti-vaccine movement grows and grows and more and more children are not vaccinated, then there will be differences. Unvaccinated children will be so many that they will begin to spread each other important diseases and, once the immune system is weakened, also minor diseases. All this, of course, will put their lives or, at the very least, their health at the moment and perhaps in the future.
"But I have seen graphics that say otherwise"
The KIGGS study is not the only one on which the anti-vaccines are supported (and you see, they are supported by saying things that are not). There is another study that also cites a lot in pages such as Natural News, Health Impact News or A Shot or Truth (come on, those that only talk about natural things and in which they reveal the true truth of things) that throws graphics like the next:
In blue you have the data of the KIGGS study for vaccinated children and in red the percentage of unvaccinated children, based on the study I commented. Now comes the good: the study is not a study. An anti-vaccine homeopath opens a page called Vaccine Injury (vaccine damage) and decides to do a survey of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. He asks those who enter, whether they vaccinate or not, to fill in the survey saying if their child (ren) suffer from any of the diseases he suggests, or others that they can add by hand. It does not ask for any data that shows that they have children or not, nor is there any control system that prevents them from answering the survey as many times as you want. Come on, that anyone enters there, enters the section that he wants, puts that he has a vaccinated son made dust and his data count. Jolin, Yes, I have since I have an unvaccinated child with continuous bronchitis and attention deficit. Come on, they put the graphic in any medium, they add the title that says "vaccinated children get sick much more than unvaccinated" and people, who believe that the media are ethical enough to find out where the graphic comes from , he even believes it.
Get your own conclusions.
Photos | Photomontage made with images of Zaldylmg and Lars Plougmann, Thinkstock
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