: Why do Vacutainer blood containers contain additives? Are they really necessary and have an effect on blood analysis? Just a basic medical science question. Is a vacutainer necessary for use in venous whole blood sample collection?

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The article you linked calls those three additives anticoagulants, and provides a link to a page on that. It starts:

Anticoagulants, commonly known as blood thinners, are chemical substances that prevent or reduce coagulation of blood, prolonging the clotting time.

If you put blood in a glass tube, or most plastic tubes, it clots to a solid quite quickly. (A few minutes on glass at body temperature.) This makes it impossible to test for anything related to clotting (since those factors may have been used up) and frankly difficult to test for anything else because you have a blob of jelly or even something the consistency of cheese, so you can't pour it, stir a reagent into it, and so on.

To overcome this difficulty, someone went to a lot of trouble to invent a tube that would keep air out, and would have specific additives in it that wouldn't themselves interfere with the testing. I expect the exact details of how much of each additive, which tests are still accurate with heparin and which are not, which are ok with EDTA and which are not, and so on, would fill a book. For the purposes of your question, we can say yes, the additives are necessary for some tests, and that is why people use them.

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These additives are required to get correct results.
They keep the blood from clotting. If blood is collected with a syringe, clotting factors will activate and this will give inaccurate results for clottingfactors and platelets, and possibly other tests as well.