SIDS and vaccines: A critical look at the data

Researchers, law enforcement, and recent data reveal a troubling correlation

Representative photo, not related to Cotwatch.

Cotwatch monitor watches for SIDS

In late 1985, retired research scientist Dr. Viera Scheibner suggested to Leif Karlsson, a biomedical electronics engineer specializing in patient monitoring systems and who would later become her husband, that he develop a breathing monitor for infants. As she wrote in Consumer Health, the monitor goes under the mattress and records the infant’s breathing whenever the child is in the crib. The breathing can be consistently monitored for weeks and gives a computerized read-out.

Our monitor gives computer print-outs, and you can monitor for weeks on end, because Cotwatch is a non-touch medical technology. The sensor pad goes under the mattress; nothing is attached to the baby and the baby can roll all over the cot while the breathing is monitored.

At the time they embarked on this project, researchers studying SIDS believed it was an innate fault in the child’s breathing control center in the brain. As such, many parents were interested in having their baby’s breathing monitored.

In 1986, pediatric researchers studying Crib Death Syndrome or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) believed babies were dying because of an inborn fault in the breathing control center in the brain. So they concentrated their studies on breathing. Many parents opted for monitoring their newborn babies' breathing at home, and we collected feedback from all parents who used our monitor in this research.

Cotwatch sounded an alarm when there were pauses in infants’ breathing and low-volume breathing. When they first gave new parents monitors nothing happened for two months and then parents reported that alarms started going off. When she asked what had happened around that time, parents said their child had been vaccinated. They had also given the parents forms to fill out (before they developed the computer print-out) and when she reviewed them she saw a pattern emerge, as she explains in the video below.

When you have a pattern that is significant because it means causal link. The evidence of the link, causal link, between vaccination and what happens afterwards, the reactions, is in clustering of the alarms.

Pediatricians not pleased to learn of the association

When they brought their findings to pediatricians, they thought they would be pleased to understand the cause of SIDS. However, much to their surprise, the pediatricians were not happy at all.

You can't have a monitor and not talk to pediatricians and we told them. We thought they would be pleased when we tell them, “Now we have it! Babies have alarms after vaccinations. . . . So you should look into that. And they were not pleased at all. Some of them look at us with hatred. . . .

Critical days and the non-specific stress response

The pattern that emerged shows that stress-affected breathing occurs on “critical days” following vaccination. In an article published by SaneVax (which included a form for parents to use to keep track of their child’s breathing and a form for doctors to fill out regarding the vaccines being given and their associated risks), medical research journalist Desiree L. Rover discussed Scheibner’s findings. She explained that they dovetail with the earlier research of Dr. Hans Selye, who showed that, in an attempt to undo the damage, the body responds to noxious substances in a typical stress syndrome.

In 1937, Rover wrote, researcher Dr. Hans Selye discovered that when a human or mammal consumes or is injected with a harmful substance, the body reacts in a predictable sequence of phases known as the non-specific stress syndrome in an attempt to counteract the damage.

Later, while analyzing data from Cotwatch, Dr. Scheibner noticed patterns that aligned with Selye’s stress response. She found that vaccination consistently triggered a sudden spike in breathing alarms among infants. By examining computer-generated records, she was able to pinpoint critical points within these patterns and compare them to documented cases of sudden infant death. Around 1990 this led her to an unexpected discovery: a clear connection between vaccination and SIDS. Her analysis also suggested that younger infants succumbed more quickly to the toxic effects of vaccines.

Rover summarized the critical hours and days as follows:

The Non-Specific Stress Response

• Stage 1 – Activation (Hours 4, 13, and 48): The body launches an immediate defense, triggering a sharp rise in corticoid activity.

• Stage 2 – Adaptation (Days 5–7 and 10–11): Defenses reach their peak as the body attempts to neutralize the stressor.

• Stage 3 – Collapse (Days 14–16, 21–24, 28, and 47): The body's defenses are depleted, leading to a crisis where it either recovers or dies.

Vaccines assault the immune system

As Dr. Scheibner related in the above video, when she and Karlsson realized that doctors and researchers were not going to get their monitors and do the research themselves, she went to the medical journals on her own to investigate vaccines. She amassed 200,000 pages of published research documenting the problems with vaccines. In 1993 she published her data on SIDS and the information she learned about vaccines in a book, “Vaccinations: 100 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent an Assault on the Immune System.”

In 2004 Dr. Scheibner published the results of her SIDS data in the Journal of the Australasian College of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine.

In a 2018 article for Vaccine Impact on the real cause of SIDS, she reviewed published research findings showing that the data from other researchers, properly tabulated, coincides with her own. In his comments on her article, Health Impact News editor Brian Shilhavy quoted medical research journalist and Director of the Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute Neil Miller, who noted that of the 130 official causes of infant deaths, vaccines are not one of them.

There are 130 official ways for an infant to die. These official categories of death, sanctioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), are published in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). When a baby dies, coroners must choose from among these 130 categories.

The official causes of death listed in the ICD include nearly every imaginable — and tragic — possibility.

However, there is NO category for infant deaths caused by vaccines.

This is odd because the federal government is aware that vaccines permanently disable and kill some babies — the very reason Congress established a “death and disability” tax on childhood vaccines more than 25 years ago when the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (Public Law 99-660) created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).

Wyeth Labs and the Tennessee SIDS cluster

Several years before Scheibner began her research into SIDS, Wyeth Labs had to recall their DTP vaccine as a result of SIDS deaths following DTP vaccination. Sott republished the Circle of Mamas article on the incident.

From August 1978 to March 1979, 11 infants died suddenly and unexpectedly within eight days of their DPT vaccination, all in Tennessee. Nine of the 11 infants had received the same lot of DPT vaccine (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) from Wyeth Laboratories: lot 64201. Four of the 11 were dead in 24 hours.

All of the deaths were classified as SIDS:

"Between August 1978 and March 1979, 77 infants in Tennessee died suddenly from unexpected causes - compared with 74 during the same period in 1977-78. These deaths were diagnosed as sudden infant death syndrome, or crib death. Of these 77 infants, eight died within a week of being vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough) using the same lot of DTP vaccine.

”Of these eight infants, one died in November 1978 and one in January 1979, both within 24 hours of having been vaccinated with this lot of vaccine.

”In early March, the CDC learned that two more infants had died within 24 hours of DTP vaccination, again from the same lot of vaccine produced by Wyeth Laboratories, Inc. That brought the total to four deaths within 24 hours of vaccination."

In March, Wyeth agreed to recall the remaining doses of lot 64201 and several other lots as well. Yet, a New York Times article about the recall (image below), which Circle of Mamas highlighted, stated that the company was recalling the vaccine at the request of the FDA “out of an abundance of caution,” and that there was no evidence that the vaccines were linked to the shot. The CDC, according to the article, said that “[t]he deaths apparently resulted from the little-understood sudden infant death syndrome also known as crib death... ‘The events in Tennessee raise more questions for which we have no ready answers.’”

Circle of Mamas also wrote about the discovery in April 1979 that other infants died following injections from other lots of Wyeth’s DPT shot.

On April 26, 1979, the US surgeon general called for a meeting with officials from CDC, FDA, top DPT researchers and drug manufacturers. The CDC reported on a survey of states that had received 7,500 or more doses of lot 64201.

The survey yielded 14 more infant deaths - half within 24 hours of a DPT shot. All were classified as crib deaths. However, the children had received vaccine from other lots.

Wyeth, rather than investigating the cause of these deaths, was more focused on ensuring that a similar cluster did not occur again. An interoffice memorandum went out instructing that its distribution centers carry a large variety of lot numbers in order to obscure future “hot lots.” The following is an image of the interoffice memorandum included by Circle of Mamas.

Police detectives associate SIDS with vaccines

Omaha

A former Omaha police detective and her husband involved in investigating SIDS cases found that 50% of SIDS cases occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 70% within a week following vaccination. Steve Kirsch wrote about SIDS in his newsletter and interviewed the detective in the video below.

As Kirsch stated in his executive summary regarding the statistics she mentioned:

This can only mean one thing: that the childhood vaccines are the leading cause of SIDS deaths.

There is no other explanation.

Even her pediatrician acknowledged this, but they aren’t allowed to talk about it. She said that the American Academy of Pediatrics trains the pediatricians in how to gaslight parents who seek to blame the vaccine.

Kirsch later found the same statistics in a review of SIDS deaths in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data base.

This paper, Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature, states this:

Of all reported SIDS cases post-vaccination, 75 % occurred within 7 days (p < 0.00001).

This almost exactly matches what Jennifer said in my interview (70% within one week). Neither of us was aware of this article at the time we made the video.

Ottawa detective

Kirsch also reported that an Ottawa, Canada, detective found a link between SIDS and vaccines. However, he notes, that it is illegal in Canada for police officers to make the association.

In Canada, if you are a police officer and suspect that vaccines cause SIDS, they will prosecute you. It seems that [it] is illegal in Ottawa to question the safety of the vaccines:

He included the following image of the Ottawa Citizen headlines stating that the officer is “accused of looking for vaccine links to child death cases.”

Real-life evidence that skipping vaccines improves infant survival

SIDS rates decreased during the COVID lockdowns. Children’s Health Defense (CHD)’s chief scientific officer Dr. Brian Hooker demonstrated how the drop in childhood vaccinations during that time resulted in a decrease in SIDS cases.

He provided the following chart showing the drop in vaccination once the national emergency was declared on March 13, 2020. The dotted line represents MMR vaccines and the solid line non-influenza vaccines.

He provided the following chart showing a precipitous decline in SIDS deaths for 2020 over previous years.

He also provided the following graph showing that spontaneous abortions also dropped during this period.

Hooker emphasized that this period of low vaccination rates with corresponding drops in SIDS deaths and spontaneous abortions suggests a relationship between the deaths and vaccines.

Drops in both SIDS death and spontaneous abortion reports to VAERS suggest a relationship between infant and fetal demise and vaccination. As the downturn in vaccination rates has afforded a unique opportunity to elucidate the presence or absence of such correlations, these effects require at a minimum further study.

He lamented that the CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink which would help researchers study these effects is closed to independent researchers. He also noted that VAERS’s limitations prevent it from providing a full picture of what is really happening.

The publicly funded CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink, which contains medical records of more than 9 million patients, is unfortunately closed to independent researchers (i.e., those outside the CDC). This is a crying shame as this database would be the perfect vehicle to study these effects directly.

VAERS gives an incomplete picture of the magnitude of the effect as it is a voluntary, passive surveillance system which is woefully under-reported.

Hooker wants CDC officials to open up its database so that the public can better understand vaccine adverse events and better protect their children.

It is long past time that CDC officials opened the more robust Vaccine Safety Datalink to the public to better understand the effects I present here and to protect against vaccine adverse events, including those that lead to infant and fetal mortality.

Considering the above evidence, does the CDC acknowledge a relationship between vaccines and SIDS? What is its official position, and what do vaccine manufacturers say about the association? In a new post, this Substack will address those questions.

The information contained in this article is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as health, medical, financial, or legal advice. Always consult a physician, lawyer, or other qualified professional regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition, health objectives, or legal or financial issues. ‍