Do 54% of Children Have a Chronic Health Condition?
Of course not.
The number comes from a 2011 report, A national and state profile of leading health problems and health care quality for US children: key insurance disparities and across-state variations, a study that is being misused by anti-vax folks.
“An estimated 43% of US children (32 million) currently have at least 1 of 20 chronic health conditions assessed, increasing to 54.1% when overweight, obesity, or being at risk for developmental delays are included; 19.2% (14.2 million) have conditions resulting in a special health care need, a 1.6 point increase since 2003.”
Bethell et al on A national and state profile
of leading health problems and health care quality for US children:
key insurance disparities and across-state variations.
For one thing, the study doesn’t say anything about vaccines.
And another, the researchers don’t actually say that 54% of children have chronic health conditions!
“And before parents panic, both studies — but especially the 2011 Academic Pediatrics paper — use rather broad definitions of chronic disease.
The 54% of kids with a chronic condition in 2007 include children with asthma, environmental allergies, ADHD, chronic ear infections, kids 10 or older who are overweight or obese, and young children “at risk” for a developmental delay, among many others.
Environmental allergies alone affected 24% of kids, while nearly a third of the older children were overweight or obese, and more than a quarter of the young children were considered at risk for developmental delay.”
Williamson Misleads on Children’s Health, Vaccines
Even more importantly, the survey on which the study was based actually says that the great majority of parents consider their kids to be in excellent or very good health!
And the percent of kids with excellent or very good health had been very steady in recent years.
In fact, in the very latest survey, it is up to 90%!
Not only are 54% of children not in poor health, with chronic health problems, 90% of today’s parents describe their children’s health as excellent or very good!
Has Bobby Kennedy Taken Over the Anti-Vaccine Movement?
What did he have to say?
“It’s a sad day for California. And it’s a sad day for our country. And I have asked a question and I would like to ask this legislature who voted for this God awful bill. If we can give government and big industries the right to inject untested medical products that are zero liability into our children coercively, where does the power of government end? What else can they order us to do? Can they do the same thing that they do in China? Which is to tell people that they have to abort their babies for “the good of society?” Can they euthanize people for “the good of society?” Where is the legal boundary?
Bobby Kennedy
It is a sad day when a Kennedy is spouting this kind of stuff…
Vaccines are well tested and everyone has a choice on whether or not to get vaccinated. Mandates to attend school do not force parents to vaccinate their kid.
Comparing these mandates that protect those who can’t be vaccinated to forced abortion and euthanasia is unconscionable.
“We have signed treaty after treaty after treaty saying you can not force an American citizen or any citizen of the civilized world to take a medication or to submit themselves to a medical procedure without informed consent. What has happened to the Democratic party? What has happened to the party that used to stand for listening to women? Why are they listening to pharmaceutical companies and not to the women?
Bobby Kennedy
What has happened to the Kennedys?
Again, vaccine mandates do not force anyone to get vaccinated and protected.
“And yet, you have all of the members who voted for this and none of them can answer the question – where is all of the autoimmune diseases coming from? If it’s not the vaccines, then where is it coming from? We have, from my generation, according to HHS, 12% of the people in my generation, prior to 1986, had chronic diseases. Today, 54% did. Let’s pretend all of those hundreds and hundreds of studies aren’t there that say it’s the vaccines.”
Actually, let’s not, because it isn’t true. Although often cited by anti-vaccine folks, the number comes from a 2011 report, A national and state profile of leading health problems and health care quality for US children: key insurance disparities and across-state variations, but doesn’t mean what most people think it means.
“An estimated 43% of US children (32 million) currently have at least 1 of 20 chronic health conditions assessed, increasing to 54.1% when overweight, obesity, or being at risk for developmental delays are included; 19.2% (14.2 million) have conditions resulting in a special health care need, a 1.6 point increase since 2003.”
Bethell et al on A national and state profile of leading health problems and health care quality for US children: key insurance disparities and across-state variations.
Is obesity a vaccine injury?
Where are the “hundreds and hundreds of studies… that say it’s the vaccines?”
“Let’s pretend that all the vaccines, everyone of those diseases, the autoimmune diseases – Guillain-Barré syndrome , cerebral palsy, diabetes, Rheumatoid arthritis. The neurodevelopmental diseases, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, ASD, autism. The allergic diseases – allergies, food allergies, eczema, asthma, anaphylaxis. Where can we find those listed? In two places. One in the list of chronic diseases that are now epidemic among American children and on the vaccine inserts. And why would the company put them on the vaccine insert? They put them there because the only way you can sue them under NCVIA is if they know or suspect of an injury being caused by a product and they failed to put it on the insert. So it’s the one place where their honest. For many years they told us, well, just because we put it on the insert, it doesn’t mean that it is actually a vaccine adverse event or caused by the vaccine. But the code of Federal regulations says you can not put it on an insert unless you believe that it’s caused by the vaccine. So they are lying.”
Bobby Kennedy
Well, someone is lying…
Although listed in the vaccine insert, if they are in the Adverse Reactions section, they may not actually be caused by the vaccine.
What goes into a vaccine insert is dictated by the FDA, specifically the Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, and Section 314 of the NCVIA, after consultation with the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines, including:
Warning and Precautions – all adverse reactions and safety hazards that may occur after getting the vaccine and what you should do if they occur
Adverse Reactions – this section includes clinical trials experience, post-marketing experience, and voluntary reports, and it is very important to understand that it is not always possible to establish a causal relationship to vaccination for these adverse effects. So just because something is listed here, whether it is SIDS, autism, drowning, or a car accident, doesn’t mean that it was actually caused by the vaccine. Updated in 2006 to require that only adverse events “for which there is some basis to believe there is a causal relationship between the drug and the occurrence of the adverse event,” it still doesn’t mean the adverse event was definitely caused by the vaccine.
As a lawyer, you would expect, or at least hope, that Bobby Kennedy understands how vaccine inserts really work…
“This state is doing something horrendous. It is stepping between a doctor and the 4000 children in this state whose doctors have told them you can not afford to get a vaccine because it could kill you or it could cripple you. Their doctor, who has known that child often-times since birth, who has reviewed the medical records, who has done all of the tests on that baby, who knows the family, has said it is dangerous to receive this product. Don’t ever do it. And yet, the State of California, is going to come in, a bureaucrat, between that doctor and that child, and say that we are going to give it to him anyway. This is criminal.”
Bobby Kennedy
This is probably one of the biggest myths about California’s new vaccine law.
Did Ron Kennedy know these kids since birth and think that vaccines would kill or cripple them because they had a learning disability or food allergies?
And the problem hasn’t typically been the legitimate medical exemptions from doctors who have known kids since birth, but rather inappropriate exemptions from doctors who advertised medical exemption consultations and appointments for new patients.
“Big pharmaceutical companies are the most evil companies on earth. Who are commoditizing our children. Who are giving our children this tsunami of chronic disease and then making the money to try and tell us that we are going to get rid of infectious disease, like chickenpox and measles, but we are going to trade that for rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes and autism and ADD and ADHD. And all of those infectious diseases are treatable and curable, usually within a week, and none of the chronic diseases that they are causing are treatable or curable. And they are making $50 billion dollars selling our kids these mandated vaccines that are untested and liability free, but they are making $500 billion a year selling them the epi-pens, the seizure medications, the Prozac, the albuterol inhalers, the rhumatoid arthritis medication, the diabetes medications that our children are now addicted to for life because of these vaccines. ”
Bobby Kennedy thinks the pharmaceutical industry is in “a war against our children.” Do you?
So what’s their next plan?
Lawsuits.
Lawsuits so that they can help keep kids unvaccinated and unprotected.
“We are an insurgency. They can not stop us now. We are not going to go away.”
Bobby Kennedy
Of course the anti-vaccine movement is not going away. It has been around since before we had the first real vaccine, when folks were getting variolated to protect them against smallpox.
“You know this is the most important battle, probably in human history.”
“What we have to understand is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called facism. And what we’re fighting for is the essential tenets of American democracy, which is free market capitalism, which we don’t have. They destroyed the markets didn’t they. There’s no market for vaccines because they couldn’t sell them, so they had to disable the markets and force us to take them against our will. And for democracy and they’ve taken democracy from us. And they’ve taken the institution of Justice directly. They have gotten rid of the 6th and 7th amendment guarantees. The Federal Constitution guarantees of a jury trials. We are the only people in our country who you can injure – a private corporation can injure and disable and you can’t get a jury trial.”
Bobby Kennedy
Except that you can’t usually get a jury trial if you think you have a vaccine injury. The only thing is that you have to go through the Vaccine Court first.
Vaccines are evaluated for safety in studies when they get approved.
Is that enough?
“I would like to see us do more long-term safety research studies on these large groups of children, so then we can determine that they are safe in the long-term.”
Bob Sears
Apparently not for everyone…
Are There Any Long-Term Studies On Vaccine Safety?
“We learn about a vaccine’s safety during clinical trials before it is licensed, and monitor it continually as millions of doses are administered after it is licensed. We also know there is not a plausible biologic reason to believe vaccines would cause any serious long-term effects. Based on more than 50 years of experience with vaccines, we can say that the likelihood that a vaccine will cause unanticipated long-term problems is extremely low.”
Parents’ Guide to Childhood Immunizations
These long term studies on vaccine safety have looked at:
Everyone should get a flu vaccine each year, as long as they are at least six months old and have no true contraindications.
Everyone needs a flu shot. When will you get yours? Photo by Gabriel Saldana (CC BY-SA 2.0)
That has been the recommendation since at least the 2010-11 flu season.
And while most kids get vaccinated, not all do.
Are Your Kids at High Risk for Flu Complications?
There are some kids, those at high risk for flu complications, who definitely shouldn’t skip or delay their flu vaccine.
all children aged 6 through 59 months (younger than age 5 years);
children who have chronic medical conditions, including pulmonary (such as asthma and cystic fibrosis), cardiovascular (excluding isolated hypertension), genetic (Down syndrome), renal, hepatic, neurologic (cerebral palsy, epilepsy, stroke, muscular dystrophy, and spina bifida, etc.), hematologic (sickle cell disease), or metabolic disorders (including diabetes mellitus and mitochondrial disorders);
children who are immunocompromised due to any cause (including immunosuppression caused by medications or by HIV infection);
teens who are or will be pregnant during the influenza season;
children and adolescents (aged 6 months through 18 years) who are receiving aspirin- or salicylate-containing medications (like for Kawasaki disease) and who might be at risk for experiencing Reye syndrome after influenza virus infection;
residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities;
American Indians/Alaska Natives;
children who are extremely obese (body mass index ≥40).
You also shouldn’t skip or delay getting a flu vaccine if your:
kids are household contacts of children aged ≤59 months (i.e., aged <5 years) and adults aged ≥50 years, particularly contacts of children aged <6 months;
kids are household contacts of someone with a medical condition that puts them at higher risk for severe complications from influenza.
Again, since everyone should get a flu vaccine, these higher risk classes shouldn’t determine whether or not you vaccinate your kids, but they might influence the timing.
Again, don’t skip your child’s flu vaccine because they aren’t in a flu high risk group.
In most flu seasons, about 80% of children with the flu who die are not vaccinated. And many of them will be otherwise healthy, without an underlying high risk medical condition.
Get your child vaccinated against the flu. And if they are in a high risk group, make sure you do it well before flu season starts and maybe as soon as flu vaccine becomes available in your area.
