In the days before the pandemic, before the antivax movement weaponized concern about new vaccines using new technology to prevent a new disease, ultimately converting those who had become anti-COVID vaccine into just antivaxxers, one of the most common claims made by the antivaccine movement was that vaccines caused sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), now often called Sudden Unexplained Infant Death Syndrome (SUIDS). A couple of weeks ago, I became aware of a post published by COVID-19 contrarian doctor and ivermectin pusher Dr. Pierre Kory that called me out specifically, but my response to it was delayed by the clown car spectacle that was the meeting of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s reconstituted—and antivaxxer–packed—Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and its aftermath. What can I say? No matter how much Dr. Kory might think himself a superhero, he just wasn’t important enough the last couple of weeks. That doesn’t mean, however, that I wouldn’t eventually get around to responding, because, hey, it’s me. The fact that the part of Dr. Kory’s post where he name-checks me is a direct defense of one of Goldman’s more awful studies only made me decide that I needed to respond, even more than two weeks later.
First, though, let’s take a look at why antivaxxers have falsely blamed vaccines for SIDS.
Vaccines and SIDS: Correlation is not causation (and not even correlation anymore)
I’ve been writing about the false claim that SIDS is caused by vaccines since at least 2006, although I didn’t really start addressing the claim in longer-form posts until around 2012, when two antivax “researchers” named Gary S. Goldman and Neil Z. Miller published a tour de force of dumpster-diving into the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database, Relative trends in hospitalizations and mortality among infants by the number of vaccine doses and age, based on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 1990–2010 (which I deconstructed in detail here, a deconstruction that Dr. Kory, for all his outrage at my criticism of the study, doesn’t address substantively) and a truly unhinged article in WorldNetDaily by the pseudonymous blogger Vox Day (a.k.a. Theodore Beale), which led me to have a lot of fun pointing out how utterly ignorant and clueless Vox Day, who had long touted his membership in Mensa, was when it came to basic medical research. Let’s just say that that post was written back in the days when I used to like to refer to neuron-apoptosing stupid. Come to think of it, I really should bring that phrase back and use it more often.
Without going into great detail, given how long this article could become, let me just tell you a fact about SIDS/SUIDS. Its peak age of incidence is between 2-4 months of age. What else is common in that age range? Well, babies get a fair number of vaccines then. If you look at the CDC recommended vaccination schedule (before RFK Jr. decimates it), you’ll see that in the age range from 2-4 months, it’s currently recommended that infants receive the second dose of hepatitis B vaccine at two months of age, as well as doses of these vaccines at two months and four months of age: rotavirus, DTaP, inactivated polio virus, haemophilus influenza type b, and pneumococcal conjugate. Now, remember what VAERS is. It’s a passive reporting system, in which reports of adverse events after vaccination are made. VAERS is not a good data source for looking at changes in actual prevalence of an adverse event over time, for the simple reason that the database is very much subject to reporting bias. Worse, it has long been corrupted by litigation, with a dramatic increase of entries linked to litigation claiming that thimerosal caused the plaintiff’s child’s autism.
Moreover, SIDS is a diagnosis of exclusion. Only after all other causes of a sudden infant death are excluded can that death be attributed to SIDS/SUIDS. Antivaxxers also like to point to the status of SIDS/SUIDS as a relatively new diagnosis, the term first coined in the 1960s. However, SIDS is nothing new, long ago, I was easily able to find a reference to SIDS in PubMed dating back to 1950, although it was in French. In fairness, the first large study of SIDS that I could find was indeed published in 1969. It was a retrospective study of 1,134 sudden, unexpected infant deaths which occurred in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio from 1956 through 1965 that laid out some classic findings, such as the vat majority of deaths occurring before six months of age, seasonal fluctuation (more common in winter), and a negative correlation with increasing socioeconomic status. (Clearly the syndrome was known before 1969, even if one cites that paper.) Using Google Scholar, I found other articles in the medical literature using related terms (such as the sudden death syndrome of infancy) dating earlier. However, the specific term SIDS was indeed first formalized in 1969 as “sudden death of an infant or young child, which is unexpected by history, and in which a thorough post mortem examination fails to demonstrate an adequate cause of death,” and it wasn’t until 1971 that SIDS was accepted as a diagnosis on death certificates. Indeed, the unexplained deaths of infants have been described for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, under various names, such as crib death or cot death. One review article even notes that, arguably SIDS was described in the Bible in the First Book of the Kings (specifically 1 Kings 3:19)
To briefly summarize my old critique of Goldman and Miller’s 2012 study, it’s dumpster-diving in the VAERS database, a time-“honored” technique of cranks, looking for any correlations they can between any adverse event and vaccines. It’s a deceptive technique that COVID-19 cranks quickly adopted as soon as the new vaccines rolled out. Mark and David Geier used to do it regularly. The VAERS wasn’t designed to look for correlations that point to true changes in prevalence of adverse events associated with vaccines, as it’s designed only as an early warning system for reporting adverse events thought to be due to vaccines. One reason is that anyone can make entries into it, not just medical professionals, and the results are only checked in the most perfunctory way. For example, as Jim Laidler described before, it takes entering something like a claim that a vaccine turned one into The Incredible Hulk in order to get the staff there to question the entry. In another incident, Kevin Leitch reported to VAERS that a vaccine turned his daughter into Wonder Woman, and the report was accepted even with the ridiculous nature of the report and despite the fact that he was reporting from a U.K. IP address.
Think about it this way. Who will report a SIDS death to VAERS? It will be who, for whatever reason, think that a vaccine or vaccines caused their child’s tragic unexpected death. In such cases, the child will almost certainly have had one or more vaccines within a few days of the death; otherwise, the parents would not have understandably confused that correlation with causation. However, multiple studies have been done that have failed to find a link between vaccination and SIDS. Indeed, the CDC still has a page discussing this issue and stating:
Babies receive multiple vaccines when they are between 2 to 4 months old. This age range is also the peak age for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The timing of the 2 month and 4 month shots and SIDS has led some people to question whether they might be related. However, studies have found that vaccines do not cause and are not linked to SIDS.
Multiple research studies and safety reviews have looked at possible links between vaccines and SIDS. The evidence accumulated over many years do not show any links between childhood immunization and SIDS.
I was pleasantly surprised that this page is still up and that RFK Jr.’s antivax minions haven’t (yet) taken it down or corrupted it to falsely claim that vaccines cause SIDS. I do note that the page appears to be less robust than an earlier version of a similar page, which lists a number of the studies that the CDC used to come to the conclusion that vaccines don’t cause SIDS. Indeed, if anything, the scientific consensus is that vaccination is likely protective given that infection seems to be associated with an increased risk of SIDS or to serve as a precipitating factors, leading to recommendations from various government health agencies (e.g., the UK’s NHS), medical professional societies (e.g., the American Academy of Pediatrics and the French National College of Midwives) that keeping babies up-to-date on their immunizations minimize the risk of SIDS. (Indeed, the AAP estimates that keeping a child vaccinated decreases the risk of SIDS by 50%.)
Another important fact to impart is that the risk of SIDS is very much increased by sleep position, as a proportion of SIDS deaths are in reality accidental suffocations. The AAP notes these bullet points:
- According to the CDC, SIDS deaths in the U.S. have dropped by more than 50% since the early 1990s, during the same timeframe that infant immunization coverage has improved.
- To address suffocation and strangulation, the American Academy of Pediatrics introduced safe sleep recommendations in the early 1990s and updated them in 2022. Safe sleep recommendations include placing infants to sleep on their back in a crib with a firm, flat surface and no pillows, blankets or toys — just the baby. They also recommend placing the crib or bassinet right next to the parent’s bed.
- Fewer than 1% of babies who die suddenly and unexpectedly have no environmental risk factors. Many sudden infant deaths probably would not happen if all these babies were placed in a safe sleep environment.
I could go on and on, but I just wanted to summarize the science before I deal with Dr. Kory’s pseudoscience.
Dr. Kory and SIDS: Let the misinformation flow
Dr. Kory, unsurprisingly, tips his hand that what he’s laying down is nothing more than a conspiracy theory right from the get-go, specifically in the title of his post, The Suppression Of Vaccine-Induced Infant Deaths (SIDS) By Public Health Agencies Across The World. Its tagline? The data that SIDS is caused by vaccines has been hiding in plain sight for decades yet, unsurprisingly, our criminal pharmaceutical-governmental public health complex has successfully suppressed it. To Kory, of course it’s a massive conspiracy that health agencies all over the world are “suppressing” the evidence that vaccines cause SIDS. Why? Who knows? What Dr. Kory does “know” is that a favorite paper of his was not published where he thought it should be published:
In my opinion, the paper below is one of the most significant papers in the field of Pediatrics in modern times. Published in 2021, it should have been heralded as a landmark paper in public health, and its findings should have been widely disseminated.
In this dream world of mine, that paper would have been published in Pediatrics, the flagship journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). In such a non-pharma-controlled world, its findings would have then been immediately broadcast via the media (TV, radio, newspapers, etc.). If non-conflicted science journalism and talk shows still existed, this would have led to an extended round of interviews on the media circuit with the author, Niel Miller.
I would argue this would have, finally, exposed to all American parents the hitherto suppressed and unacknowledged lethal risks of vaccination in infants.
OK, sorry, I got carried away there. Of course, that wouldn’t happen because those actions would have instead resulted in an epidemic of the most feared disease of our Public Health establishment, that of “vaccine hesitancy” in our nation’s mothers and fathers.
Unsurprisingly, the paper was instead published in a peripheral journal called “Toxicology Reports.” In that field, it is reasonably well regarded, but who reads toxicology journals? At least it was in a decent peer-reviewed journal, so all hope is not lost.
Let’s put it this way. Toxicology Reports is no longer particularly well-regarded, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain. Maybe it was at one time, but starting with Goldman and Miller’s 2012 paper it seems to have become rather too receptive to publishing antivax “science,” which tends to taint whatever other good science might still be published in the journal. Amusingly, the paper that Dr. Kory is praising happens to be Miller’s followup to their original article. (Where’s Goldman, I wonder?) In any case, it’s almost not worth discussing this followup given that it basically uses very similar methods as the fatally flawed original paper and finds—surprise!—the same thing. Indeed, Kory reproduces this graph from the 2012 paper:
If you know how VAERS works, this sort of result would be utterly predictable, given that only parents who think that vaccines had cause their child’s death are going to report that death to VAERS as vaccine-related. Even in the case of zero relationship between vaccination and SIDS, one would expect this sort of result by the very nature of the VAERS database alone. Again, VAERS is a hypothesis-generating system. It can’t really be used this way to prove causation, and the way miller did it is particularly brain-dead. Not that that stopped Miller from launching into some serious hand-waving:
The findings in this study revealed that infant deaths and SIDS cases were not randomly distributed each day. Instead, infant mortality and SIDS cases reported to VAERS tended to occur in temporal proximity to vaccine administration, that is, they clustered in the early post-vaccination period—Day 1 through Day 7 (Fig. 2). Excess deaths were significantly greater than expected (p < 0.00001).
Quelle surprise, given that cases reported to VAERS are not, by the very nature of VAERS, representative of the whole population. Of course, excess mortality in the VAERS population will be higher than the general population; parents are reporting the tragic deaths of their children to the database. Of course, deaths will cluster temporally after vaccination. Parents are reporting their children’s deaths to VAERS because they think vaccines caused the deaths.
None of this stops Miller from speculating wildly as to a “mechanism”:
Several theories regarding the pathogenic mechanism behind these fatal events have been proposed. According to Douglas Miller [20], neuropathologist and expert witness on SIDS, vaccines evoke the production of cytokines that can produce fever and inhibit the activity of 5-HT neurons in the medulla causing prolonged apneas and interference with auto-resuscitation. Matturri et al. [21] hypothesized that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier “inducing neuronal molecular alterations in DNA, RNA, and proteins of brainstem neurons regulating vital functions, with consequent fatal disorganization of respiratory control in particularly predisposed infants.” Miller and Goldman [22] suggested the potential for biochemical or synergistic toxicity due to multiple vaccines administered concurrently.
Is any of this more than handwaving? Hope. It’s what antivaxxers do. Dr. Kory makes it even stupider, as in neuron-apoptosingly stupid:
Let’s take Miller for what it is – basically, all kids were vaccinated (they were in VAERS) and he looked for a temporal association with the vaccine. The vast majority died within a week, when, again, if these deaths were random and unassociated, you would expect the same # of deaths each day for weeks after the vaccine, yet 70% occurred within a week.
You might expect that in the general population, but, again, cases reported to VAERS are not the general population. As Miller notes himself, they were children who died of SIDS/SUIDS, and their parents thought that vaccination caused the deaths. When might a parent confuse correlation with causation when it comes to the horror of the death of their baby? Obviously, they’re more likely to make make that link when the death occurs within a short time of receiving vaccinations, and one week is a short time. Again, by the very nature of the VAERS database, one would expect this result.
Dr. Kory is also really unhappy about my critique of a Goldman/Miller paper:
Full disclose and transparency here: I came across a blistering critique and rebuttal of the Miller paper by the most famous troll of vaccine skeptics (and troll of all alternative medicine which he labels “pseudoscience”), the one and only Dr. David Gorski (who, humorously has dubbed my esteemed and erudite colleague AMD, “A Midwestern Quack”).
Gorski has gone after me and my ivermectin “pseudoscience numerous times on social media and in blog posts. I find him amusing in his consistent antagonism for anything that deviates from Establishment narratives. Most revealing about him (and people like Peter Hotez) is his repeated refusal to debate any vaccine skeptic, such as Dr. Sheri Tenpenny or RFK Jr. (the two of them would likely wipe the floor with him, and he knows it). It was a very weak, largely ad-hominem critique and was easily rebutted by Goldman and Miller. Can read the full article posted by the Liberty Beacon here but I will briefly excerpt it below.
I laughed out loud at Dr. Kory calling A Midwestern Doctor his “esteemed and erudite colleague.” Let’s just put it this way, there are a lot of reasons why I dubbed AMD “A Midwestern Quack,” not the least of which is his (I assume it’s a male, but who knows?) promotion of DMSO as a cure-all. immediately noticed something here. Dr. Kory seems to be conflating two different claims, the claim that vaccines cause SIDS and the other related antivax claim that vaccines increase infant mortality. For clarity, in 2011, I critiqued Goldman and Miller’s study claiming that vaccines increased infant mortality, a truly risible study that cherry picked countries and tried to relate their infant mortality rates to the number of vaccinations in their childhood schedule, the estimation of which was riddled with errors. They even did it using linear regression to relate the number of vaccines to infant mortality! It was a study that they updated in 2023, to no better effect. Let’s just say that the 2023 study was just as much nonsense as the 2011 study was, rather like Miller’s 2021 VAERS study of vaccines and SIDS was just as much nonsense as the Goldman/Miller 2012 study was, only “updated.”
Really, the only thing that Dr. Kory seems to be able to criticize my original post over is this:
Gorski argued that Goldman and Miller had conflicts of interest that swayed their analysis — Miller, because he operates a website that promotes informed consent, and Goldman, because he founded a medical journal that published papers critical of vaccines. Strong work, Dr. Gorski.
Guilty as charged! I did indeed point out that Miller and Goldman had major conflicts of interest, just as an antivaxxer would point it out if I had a financial relationship with a vaccine manufacturer or pharmaceutical company. (I don’t, of course, but that never stopped them from making ones up as part of the “pharma shill” gambit.) If that were the only criticism that I had made, Dr. Kory might have a point. It wasn’t. I mentioned the conflicts of interest in passing, as just one thing wrong with the paper and not even anything resembling the most important problem. Instead, Dr. Kory just jumps ahead to another criticism of the original 2011 paper on vaccines and infant mortality, specifically a reanalysis by the Miller Lab at Brigham Young University in Utah, as part of the BYU Bioinformatics Capstone course, which was apparently what prompted Goldman and Miller to “reanalyze” the data from the Goldman/Miller 2011 paper in order to refute the critique. I addressed all that in my 2023 post, specifically why Goldman and Miller just kept making the same mistakes, which, unsurprisingly, Dr. Kory appears not to have noticed.
Again, much of Dr. Kory’s post is Gish galloping, but I can’t help but mention this part, in which Kory refers to a 2017 Vaccine Court ruling that provided compensation to the parents of “J.B.,” an infant who died after vaccination:
In 2017, the United States Court of Federal Claims issued a decision with regard to a claimfiled with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. An African-American male infant, J.B., received seven vaccines at his 4-month well-baby visit. On the following day, he died during his nap. The medical examiner stated that the cause of death was SIDS, and it was “natural.” Expert testimony by Dr. Douglas C. Miller, a neuropathologist, explained that when you receive one or more vaccines at once, as J.B. did, it evokes the production of cytokines. Physiological studies have shown that these can produce fever and inhibit the activity of 5-HT neurons in the medulla, causing prolonged apneas and interference with auto-resuscitation. Dr. Miller noted that J.B. was a “healthy infant…developing normally.” He was “immunologically normal.”
Special Master Thomas L. Gowen issued his decision: “I have concluded that the petitioners have demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence that the vaccines can and likely did play a critical role in this child’s death by stimulating the production of inflammatory cytokines that suppressed the respiratory response system and caused the vulnerable infant to be unable to respond in the normal way to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in his system. The role of inflammatory cytokines as neuromodulators in the infant medulla has been well described. It is likely the reason for a significant number of SIDS deaths occurring in conjunction with mild infection. I have concluded that it is more likely than not that the vaccine-stimulated cytokines had the same effect in this vulnerable infant during sleep. Accordingly, petitioners are entitled to compensation. A separate damages order will issue.”
I wrote about this case extensively after it was decided in 2017, explaining exactly why the ruling did not support the conclusion that vaccines cause SIDS. What Dr. Kory also forgets to mention is that this Vaccine Court ruling was overturned in 2018 based on the facts, a decision that was reaffirmed in 2019:
On July 18, 2018, a Judge of the Court of Federal Claims overturned the NVICP SIDS vaccine decision that awarded compensation to Mr. and Mrs. Boatmon for the death of their baby, JB. The Court found that the Special Master’s decision was arbitrary and capricious because it ignored previous decisions and applied a too-low standard of proof to the case.
As Dorit Reiss commented on the decision overruling the original Vaccine Court decision to compensate J.B.’s parents:
Applying this standard, the Court of Federal Claims overturned the Special Master’s decision. The Court examined several NVICP decisions on similar facts that rejected compensation. The Court pointed out that “Petitioners were not able to cite a single Vaccine Program opinion finding that vaccinations had caused SIDS.”
The Court said:A Special Master is not bound to follow the opinions of other Special Masters; however, when issuing an opinion extending vaccine causation to previously uncharted areas, a clear explanation would be expected, if not critical. The Special Master here made no acknowledgment of the other cases reaching opposite conclusions and made no attempt to distinguish the instant case from any of the others.This is well in line with general administrative law principles. Agencies do not have to follow their own precedents; but if they wish to deviate from a line of precedent, they need to explain their actions. (for example, Davila-Bardales v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1st Circuit 1994; Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, Inc, 556 U.S. 502 (2009)).The Special Master here did not even try – he completely ignored previous decisions.
Funny how that works. I’ve often characterized the Vaccine Court as “bending over backwards” to make it easy for petitioners to present their cases and receive compensation. The case above is one that reinforced my perception. Also, funny how Dr. Kory doesn’t mention that this decision was overturned. Pro tip to Dr. Kory, who’s an amateur at spinning conspiracy theories, from someone who’s been studying conspiracy theories for decades: You could have made this narrative into a better conspiracy theory if you had actually mentioned that the case was later overturned. You could have portrayed it as The Man, alarmed at the Vaccine Court actually making a finding of Truth, coming in to stomp on it and destroy the inconvenient ruling that might make people start to see The Truth.
Damn, if I ever turned to the Dark Side, I could clean up.
Pierre Kory the conspiracy theorist
I’ll conclude by looking at how Dr. Kory spins all his cherry-picked studies and Gish galloping. Suffice to say, leave it to Dr. Kory to ignore pertinent information in his quest to falsely claim that vaccines cause SIDS and spin a conspiracy theory around the “suppression” of evidence, as he does near the end of his post:
I maintain that the global suppression of vaccine-induced infant deaths by public health agencies is not just a matter of bureaucratic oversight or scientific debate—it is a calculated campaign of obfuscation, misdirection, and denial that has persisted for decades. Recall the notion that, from the Watergate scandal, “the cover-up is the crime,” which encapsulates the idea that efforts to conceal wrongdoing can be as incriminating as, or even constitute, the primary offense itself.
Through strategic reclassification of causes of death, removal of vaccine-related mortality codes from international diagnostic manuals, and relentless messaging to dismiss any link between vaccines and sudden infant deaths, these agencies have prioritized the preservation of vaccination programs over the lives and voices of the most vulnerable: our infants and their families.
Yes, it’s just a restatement of what I like to call the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement, namely that vaccines are dangerous—and cause SIDS!—but that “They” (in this case the CDC and government health agencies all over the world, including (apparently) the entire medical profession, are keeping The Truth from You, Brave Truth-seeker! Never forget that Dr. Kory is antivaccine as they come. If you don’t believe me, just look at what he Tweeted back in 2022:
That is about as succinct a statement that one is antivax as I can think of. Of course, Dr. Kory believes every antivax conspiracy theory out there, including very old ones.