People who don’t allow their children to be vaccinated are doing them a great dis-service. Unvaccinated children have poorer life outcomes, get sicker, earn less money and have poorer cognitive ability in old-age than peers.
Writing in a Working Paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research Hamid Oskorouchi et. al. provide (yet more ) evidence for the above in what they believe is the first study of its kind to look at the relationship between childhood (under age-15) vaccination and long-term cognitive ability outcomes by studying a cohort of Chinese over age 45.
China is fertile ground for such a study as vaccination in China was introduced on a wide scale in 1950 but during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution the practice declined. Therefore a lot of the older population missed vaccination altogether so a broad comparison between the fortunate who received early jabs and the less-so who missed them is possible.
China today carries out a regular check on its older residents called the China Health & Retirement Longitudinal Study or CHARLS and it’s with access to this date the researchers sought to establish the vaccination link.
The bottom line is vaccinated children on average get an extra year of schooling and this effect produces a lifetime income advantage of around 8% and measurable improved cognitive ability* later on in life. The societal benefits of this double-win should be self-evident.
[*One of the tests, which is neat because it easily be applied cross-culturally is a reverse count from 100 subtracting 7 each time. Give it a go, oh, and then do it three more times. See how you get on. I struggled, no surprise there then!]
It’s with touching naivete however the researchers conclude “We thus hope that, at a time when growing public vaccination hesitancy is lowering herd immunity in both high-and middle-low-income countries… , the robust evidence provided here of vaccination’s long-term beneficial effects will mitigate reluctance and increase the demand for immunization.”
They’re assuming, of course, the superstitious who willfully deny children vaccinations have regular truck with scientific proofs. Bless.
You can access the paper in full via the following link Vaccinating Children.
Happy Sunday.