Claim: A Harvard study proved that “unvaccinated children pose no risk” to other kids.
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Vaccine controversies
text: where not required by law. Refusal of doctors to treat unvaccinated children may cause harm to both the child and public health, and may be considered unethical, if the parents are unable to find another healthcare provider for the child. Opinion on this is divided, with the largest professional association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, saying that exclusion may be an option under narrowly defined circumstances. Others have questioned whether it is right to punish a child for parents' bad choices. Vaccination has been opposed on religious grounds ever since it was introduced. Some Christian opponents argued, when vaccination was

title: Letchworth Village
text: Hilary Koprowski, after he tried it on himself. After the patient suffered no side effects, the vaccine was administered to 19 more of the institution's children. Out of a total of 20 children, 17 developed antibodies to the virus, and none developed any complications. Reports of inadequate funding and improper care of the residents, including children, were present dating back to the 1920s. Accounts surfaced of residents being found unclothed, unbathed, and neglected. In addition to rampant abuse among the institution's residents, staff also suffered abuse at the hands of co-workers, which included incidents of rape. In 1996 the institution

title: Vaccination
text: fraud. This Lancet article has sparked a much greater anti-vaccination movement, primarily in the United States. Even though the article was fraudulent and was retracted, 1 in 4 parents still believe vaccines can cause autism. Many parents do not vaccinate their children because they feel that diseases are no longer present due to vaccination. This is a false assumption, since diseases held in check by immunization programs can and do still return if immunization is dropped. These pathogens could possibly infect vaccinated people, due to the pathogen's ability to mutate when it is able to live in unvaccinated hosts. In

title: Vaccine controversies
text: to the best available medical care, including vaccines, regardless of parental feelings toward vaccines, saying "Arguments about medical freedom and choice are at odds with the human and constitutional rights of children. When parents won’t protect them, governments must." A review of court cases from 1905 to 2016 found that, of the 9 courts that have heard cases regarding whether not vaccinating a child constitutes neglect, 7 have held vaccine refusal to be a form of child neglect. To prevent the spread of disease by unvaccinated individuals, some schools and doctors' surgeries have prohibited unvaccinated children from being enrolled, even

title: Willowbrook State School
text: the children hepatitis, Krugman increased that chance to 100 percent. According to the celebrated vaccinologist Maurice Hilleman, "They [the Willowbrook studies] were the most unethical medical experiments ever performed on children in the United States." Historian David Rothman notes that, "The research was even included in Henry Beecher's 1966 "New England Journal of Medicine" listing of "ethically dubious" experiments." Bioethicist Art Caplan has stated that, "The Willowbrook studies were a turning point in how we thought about medical experiments on retarded children... Children inoculated with hepatitis virus had no chance to benefit from the procedure — only the chance to

title: Non-specific effect of vaccines
text: and thus they will tend to be allocated as deaths in unvaccinated children – thus incorrectly inflating the mortality rate among unvaccinated children. This bias has been described before, but in different contexts, as the distinction between 'landmark' and 'retrospective updating' analysis of cohort data. The retrospective updating method can lead to a considerable bias in vaccine studies, biasing observed mortality rate ratios towards zero (a large effect), whereas the landmark method leads to a non-specific misclassification and biases the mortality rate ratio towards unity(no effect). An additional problem with the literature on the nonspecific effects of vaccines has been

title: Non-specific effect of vaccines
text: vaccinations were typically collected in periodic surveys, and the information on vaccinations, which occurred between successive home visits, was updated at the time of the second visit. The person-time at risk in unvaccinated and vaccinated states was then divided up according to the date of vaccination during the time interval between visits. This method opens up a potential bias, insofar as the updating of person time at risk from unvaccinated to vaccinated is only possible for children who survive to the second follow-up. Those who die between visits typically do not have vaccinations between the first visit and death recorded,

title: Robert Sears (physician)
text: in the 1990s, the party line within the medical community was that vaccines do not cause severe reactions...So the party line has changed to the opinion that such severe reactions are so rare that the general population doesn't (and shouldn't) need to worry about them." In 2014, Sears said that he thinks "the disease danger is low enough where I think you can safely raise an unvaccinated child in today's society." Although he is characterized as an anti-vaccine doctor and a vaccine delayer, he does admit that vaccines work: "Chicken pox, measles, whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, all these diseases that

title: Risk aversion
text: a road traffic accident on the way to it), and—some argue—children may attempt more dangerous acts, with confidence in the artificial surface. Shiela Sage, an early years school advisor, observes "Children who are only ever kept in very safe places, are not the ones who are able to solve problems for themselves. Children need to have a certain amount of risk taking ... so they'll know how to get out of situations." A vaccine to protect children against the three common diseases measles, mumps and rubella was developed and recommended for all children in several countries including the UK. However,

title: Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver
text: results by Thomas Verstraeten which showed that thimerosal might increase children's risk of neurodevelopmental delays were flawed, and how these results were discussed at the 2000 Simpsonwood CDC conference. (p. 404) It received a positive review from David Oshinsky in the "New York Times". It also received a positive review in the "Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine", where Michael Fitzpatrick wrote that Allen "does not ignore the history of vaccine disasters. He includes the fiasco in the US military in 1942, when yellow fever vaccine contaminated with hepatitis B caused 100 deaths, and the mass vaccination against smallpox

title: Non-specific effect of vaccines
text: endemic and often fatal. Many observational studies have shown that measles-vaccinated children have substantially lower mortality than can be explained by the prevention of measles-related deaths. Many of these observational studies were natural experiments, such as studies comparing the mortality before and after the introduction of measles vaccine and other studies where logistical factors rather than maternal choice determined whether a child was vaccinated or not. These findings were later supported in randomized trials from 2003 to 2009 in Guinea-Bissau. An intervention group of children given standard titer measles vaccine at 4.5 and 9 month of age had a 30%

title: Rachel Schneerson
text: July 2012. Rachel Schneerson is best known for her work on the vaccine for Haemophilus influenza type B, or Hib. Prior to the vaccine’s use, Hib infected 20,000 U.S. children younger than age 5 each year; 5% died of those, and one-third were left with intellectual disability, deafness, or seizures. It was the leading cause of acquired intellectual disability in the United States. Schneerson and Robbins believed that they could induce immunity by injecting a single antigen—the polysaccharide (sugar) from the surface of the bacteria—into children. Few others believed this process could work because the accepted belief at the time

title: Vaccine controversies
text: vaccine overload hypothesis, combined with these findings directly contradicting it, has led to the conclusion that currently recommended vaccine programs do not "overload" or weaken the immune system. Any experiment based on withholding vaccines from children has been considered unethical, and observational studies would likely be confounded by differences in the health care-seeking behaviours of under-vaccinated children. Thus, no study directly comparing rates of autism in vaccinated and unvaccinated children has been done. However, the concept of vaccine overload is biologically implausible, vaccinated and unvaccinated children have the same immune response to non-vaccine-related infections, and autism is not an immune-mediated

title: Health in the United States
text: cited this increased use of exemptions as contributing to loss of herd immunity within these communities, and hence an increasing number of disease outbreaks. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) advises physicians to respect the refusal of parents to vaccinate their child after adequate discussion, unless the child is put at significant risk of harm (e.g., during an epidemic, or after a deep and contaminated puncture wound). Under such circumstances, the AAP states that parental refusal of immunization constitutes a form of medical neglect and should be reported to state child protective services agencies. See Vaccination schedule for the vaccination

title: Non-specific effect of vaccines
text: incidence of tuberculosis it would have been unethical to randomize children into 'BCG' vs. 'no BCG' groups. However, many low-income countries delay BCG vaccination for low-birth-weight (LBW) infants; this offered the opportunity to directly test the effect of BCG on overall mortality. In the first two randomised controlled trials receipt of BCG+OPV at birth vs. OPV only ('delayed BCG') was associated with strong reductions in neonatal mortality; these effects were seen as early as 3 days after vaccination. BCG protected against sepsis as well as respiratory infections. Among BCG vaccinated children, those who develop a BCG scar or a positive

title: Infant mortality
text: conducted by the Institute of Medicine's Immunization Safety Review Committee concluded that there is no relationship between these vaccines and risk of SIDS in infants. This tells us that not only is it extremely necessary for every child to get these vaccines to prevent serious diseases, but there is no reason to believe that if your child does receive an immunization that it will have any effect on their risk of SIDS. Political modernization perspective, the neo-classical economic theory that scarce goods are most effectively distributed to the market, say that the level of political democracy influences the rate of

title: Measles vaccine
text: cases of measles reported in the U.S. in 2005, slightly over half were attributable to one unvaccinated individual who acquired measles during a visit to Romania. This individual returned to a community with many unvaccinated children. The resulting outbreak infected 34 people, mostly children and virtually all unvaccinated; 9% were hospitalized, and the cost of containing the outbreak was estimated at $167,685. A major epidemic was averted due to high rates of vaccination in the surrounding communities. The vaccine has non specific effects such as preventing respiratory infections, that may be greater than those of measles prevention alone. These benefits

title: Epidemiology of measles
text: the park, with 117 infections linked by primary or secondary exposure. Among the 110 California patients, 49 (45%) were unvaccinated; five (5%) had 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine, seven (6%) had 2 doses, one (1%) had 3 doses, 47 (43%) had unknown or undocumented vaccination status, and one (1%) had immunoglobulin G seropositivity documented, which indicates prior vaccination or measles infection at an undetermined time. 12 of the unvaccinated patients were infants too young to be vaccinated. Medical professionals, such as David Gorski, have criticized physicians and pediatricians in the area who do not adhere to the CDC's recommended vaccination

title: Varicella vaccine
text: thought to commonly result in lifelong immunity. Indeed, parents have deliberately ensured this in the past with "pox parties". Historically, exposure of adults to contagious children has boosted their immunity, reducing the risk of shingles. The CDC and corresponding national organisations are carefully observing the failure rate which may be high compared with other modern vaccines—large outbreaks of chickenpox having occurred at schools which required their children to be vaccinated. Prior to the introduction of the vaccine in 1995 in the United States (released in 1988 in Japan and Korea), there were around 4,000,000 cases per year in the United

title: Vaccine controversies
text: first becoming widespread, that if God had decreed that someone should die of smallpox, it would be a sin to thwart God's will via vaccination. Religious opposition continues to the present day, on various grounds, raising ethical difficulties when the number of unvaccinated children threatens harm to the entire population. Many governments allow parents to opt out of their children's otherwise mandatory vaccinations for religious reasons; some parents falsely claim religious beliefs to get vaccination exemptions. The Haredi burqa sect in Israel opposed vaccinations and medical treatments on moral grounds, which led to the death of at least one baby