Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS, Cot Death, Crib Death) and Vaccination: A causal connection - Part 1

This article is the first in a series about the connection between vaccination and SIDS.

The other week, I published an article by Julian Gillespie on the connection between vaccines and SIDS. There were a range of comments, including a few very abusive ones from people who I have blocked for one week from commenting after warning them to please be kind. This is my Substack page and I won’t tolerate that behaviour from anyone. We will treat each other respectfully or people will not be allowed to comment.

I had actually planned to write about SIDS when I received Julian’s excellent piece because this is a subject that has haunted my family since I was young. I know that many others reading this have also had experiences with infant death.

Two deaths - A lifetime of sorrow

My cousins Eileen and Joel lost a baby when they were young parents. I was very young myself at the time, so I am not sure whether this was their first child or not, but I grew up hearing about how this perfectly healthy and beautiful baby was just found dead in their cot one morning. They had other children, but never recovered from this death, nor did they ever stop questioning why their baby would have passed away. They were told that it was just something that happened and to move on. As if.

My piano teacher of 20 years, Barbara, had 2 beautiful daughters, one of whom was my age and in my class at school. In between those girls, she had a boy. I knew her for years before she told me about this baby. He died at six months of age. One day, she went to get him up in the morning and found him dead. She told me way back then that the only thing she could remember that was different was that he’d been to the doctor the day before but he hadn’t been sick. I can only assume now that he had gone for his ‘well-baby’ visit and gotten his 6-month jabs. She told me that she never spoke about him because it made her too sad, but that the questions about his death and how her own life would have changed had this child survived never left her.

My own family’s close call

Many of you have probably already heard this story, but for those who haven’t, I will repeat it. My eldest son was born at a time when I was still a true believer in vaccination. Actually, that’s not really accurate. I never thought about vaccines - I just did what I was told.

After a difficult birth and a hard first 2 months, we took him for his first vaccinations - DPT and Oral Polio. This little baby who never cried - I had to wake him up every 4 hours to feed him, or he would just keep sleeping - cried for 5 hours straight and developed obstructive sleep apnoea. We could hear him breathing from the lounge room when he was in the bedroom with the door closed. He regularly stopped breathing at night, and my husband and I would count to 10. If he didn’t start again, we’d get up and give him a little bit of a shake to get him going. I spoke with the hospital about getting a monitor, but they told me that it would just worry us unnecessarily. So for over a year until his breathing began to improve, we barely got any sleep at night. I was always afraid that he wouldn’t start breathing again or I wouldn’t hear him when he stopped.

What is SIDS?

We need to define what SIDS actually is since many people are unaware, and the vast majority of deaths that have SIDS on the official paperwork can have alternative explanations.

SIDS is defined as the sudden and unexplained death of a previously healthy child under the age of 12 months. Prior to 1969, SIDS did not exist. Yes, there have been unexplained deaths of babies through the ages - but in most cases, they were caused by parents who’d had too much to drink, overlaying their children at night.

Before the introduction of the Back to Sleep campaign, the upper age limit for SIDS was undefined, meaning that older infants and children could be and were classed as SIDS deaths if they died unexpectedly.

In addition, in 1991, a redefinition of SIDS by consensus (that most unscientific of words) saw many cases that previously would have been classed as Sudden Infant Death instead given different diagnoses.

These two simple steps - restricting the age of SIDS diagnosis to early infancy and redefining which deaths can and cannot be classed as SIDS - led to an overnight reduction in these deaths without actually saving the life of one child. This provided instant ‘proof’ that sleeping your baby on its back, despite all the obvious downsides of head moulding, inhaling vomit etc. would prevent them from dying of SIDS.

‘Medical science’ is never more at home than when redefining a condition in order to deflect attention from its real causes. Eg the redefinition of polio, chicken pox, and SARS/the common cold.

Healthy babies dying unexpectedly?

Historically, many babies who died unexpectedly were anything but healthy before their death, but even so, they were put into the SIDS wastebasket because it was easy, convenient and allowed the doctor who administered the shots, the authorities who approved them, and the coroner who wrote the cause of death off the hook.

In fact, it was not then and is not now uncommon for grieving parents to be blamed for their own child’s death without any evidence. We will cover the issues surrounding Shaken Baby Syndrome (or as I prefer to call it, Shaken Maybe Syndrome) in a later article.

Baby Dylan: 5 days of non-stop screaming after vaccination

A young couple in WA lost their first baby, Dylan, five days after his first vaccinations. He screamed almost non-stop for that entire time and was seen by multiple doctors who did absolutely nothing for him but simply made excuses for his condition.

On the fifth day post-vaccination, Dylan settled. His relieved parents finally got some much-needed sleep. Four hours later, when they were awakened by a ringing phone, they found Dylan dead.

The coroner stated that Dylan had died of SIDS. What part of ‘previously healthy’ did he not understand?

The difference between now and then is that, at the time, the newspapers printed questions about whether Dylan’s death might have been related to his vaccines. That would never happen today!

At all times, members of government, the medical fraternity and the media - that unholy, incestuous trinity - will deny any connection between jabs that have been administered and injuries or deaths in babies. This is true even when the temporal relationship is so strong only a fool could miss it.

In the next part of this series, we will talk about a bit more of the history of SIDS/vaccine denialism in Australia and some of the leading lights on this topic - Dr Viera Scheibner and Dr Archie Kalokerinos - both of whom are Australian heroes and treasures.