The relative risk of adverse health outcomes in older children who continued to vaccinate compared to those who ceased vaccination in Thomas’ practice.

Combined, all of these results mean that the method developed by Lyons-Weiler to consider the number of office visits needed for adverse health outcomes represents a robust, reliable and rigorous advance in methodology for the study of adverse health outcomes following medical exposures, including vaccines.

The method, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits,” had already been shown to be more powerful.

Lyons-Weiler reports that this is necessarily so because the measure contains more information than mere rates of diagnosis.

The RIOV measure has a higher dynamic range than odds ratios and relative risks based on diagnosis only. Studies that focus on the rates of diagnosis are using a subset of RIOV but are only limiting their count of office visits to that for the initial diagnosis.

The authors estimated that vaccination increases the need for visits to the doctor for vaccine-related health outcomes at a rate of 2.56 to 4.98 new chronic-illness-related visits per unit increase in vaccination per year.

“That translates into far more chronic illness in vaccinating children than in those not vaccinating, a disease burden that is not considered in risk: benefit considerations when it comes to vaccine policies and laws,” said Lyons-Weiler.

The paper, which was subjected to blinded peer review, describes all of the details of the results, is open access, and is published in the peer-reviewed journal International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Research, and Practice.