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I think everyone here needs a little dash of Coulter.
Read it and marvel at the man's thoroughness.
This type of writing so impressed me that I asked Dr. Coulter if I could
compile his writings on Junk Science and he gave me permission. The
result is Good Science or Junk Science. (I had the honor of writing the
foreword.) You can see and order it if
desired at www.korenpublications.com
or call us at 800-537-3001 (US and
Canada) or 215-567-2511.
Tedd Koren, DC
SIDS and Vaccines By Harris L. Coulter, Ph.D.
Crib death was so infrequent in the pre-vaccination era that it was not even
mentioned in the statistics, but it started to climb in the 1950s with the
spread of mass vaccination against diseases of childhood. It became a matter of
public and professional concern and even acquired a new name, "sudden
infant death of unknown origin, or, for short, SIDS.
This name is significant, in the light of subsequent controversies, since of
unknown origin" means exactly that. So, when the medical
establishment assures us that SIDS is unrelated to vaccinations, the
obvious response is, How do you know?, if it is defined as
"of unknown origin"? At this (as with most
common-sense questions about vaccinations) the medical establishment
prefers to retire from the debate in dignified silence.
So we have witnessed a steady rise in the incidence of SIDS, closely
following the growth in childhood vaccinations. But information on the
progress of this epidemic has been radically suppressed in the
official literature. Whereas in earlier decades -- up to the end of
the 1950s -- the medical establishment could recognize the fact of death
after vaccination, more recently, as the official position has hardened,
the earlier concessions have been withdrawn, and
vaccinations of all kinds are now declared absolutely safe at all times
and in all places. This has required some fancy footwork with the
epidemiologic statistics, as we will see below.
And since no physician or scientist with a normal IQ could really believe
this "epidemiology," one is forced to conclude that the medical
establishment, in its wisdom, has decided that 7000-8000 cases of crib
death every year are a reasonable price to pay for a nice steady flow
of vaccines with all their concomitant benefits for the public health
(except, of course, for these same 7000-8000 babies each year who have already enjoyed
all the possible advantages of childhood
vaccines).
After all, they say to themselves, you can't make an omelet without
breaking eggs. But the eggs being broken are small, helpless, and innocent
babies, while the omelet is being enjoyed by the pediatricians
and vaccine manufacturers.
Death after whooping-cough vaccination was first described by a Danish
physician in 1933. Two Americans in 1946 described the deaths of identical
twins within 24 hours of a DPT shot (on the background and history of
SIDS see H. Coulter and B. Fisher, DPT: A Shot in the Dark). E. M. Taylor
and J. L. Emery in 1982 wrote: "we cannot exclude the possibility of
recent immunisation being one of several contributory factors in an
occasional unexpected infant death."
But the early 1980s were a turning point in the official line. In that
same year of 1982 matters came to a crisis when William C. Torch, M.D.,
Director of Child Neurology, Department of Pediatrics, University of
Nevada School of Medicine, at the 34th Annual Meeting of the American
Academy of Pediatrics, presented a study linking the DPT shot with SIDS.
Torch concluded: "These data show that DPT vaccination may be a
generally unrecognized major cause of sudden infant and early childhood
death, and that the risks of immunization may outweigh its potential
benefits. A need for reevaluation and possible modification
of current vaccination procedures is indicated by this study.
Torch's report provoked an uproar in the American Academy of Pediatrics.
At a hastily arranged press conference he was soundly chastised for using
"anecdotal data," meaning (will you believe it?) that he
actually interviewed the families concerned!
This mistake was not made again. Gerald M. Fenichel, MD, chairman of the
Department of Neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in 1983
published an article on vaccinations entitled "the danger of
case reports," and the pro-vaccination literature produced in
profusion in later years and decades has generally steered away from and
around any such thing as a "case
report." These researchers will examine with minute precision
hospital card files, Medicare cover sheets, even physicians' records, but
God preserve us from contact with the children themselves or their
families!
Another sign of the hardening official position was a two-part article by
Daniel Shannon, M.D., in a 1982 issue of the New England Journal of
Medicine. Shannon was Director of the Pediatric Pulmonary Unit at
the Massachusetts General Hospital and a "principal investigator"
of SIDS. His article on the causes of SIDS (financed by the U.S. Public
Health Service) never mentioned vaccination even though, at a 1979
FDA meeting on "The Relation between DPT Vaccines and
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome," Shannon had described 200 infants with
severe breathing difficulties after a DPT shot, such that they required
resuscitation. In 1979 he had said: "We do have all this data. It is
all recorded on tabular sheets, and we have it on nearly 200 infants
that we have evaluated this way. It is in a capacity that it can be
pulled, but in 1982 he preferred not to pull this information after all.
When Barbara Fisher and I queried him on this in a 1982 letter, he
replied: "I did not mention DPT shots in my review article on SIDS in
the New England Journal of Medicine because there are no data collected in
a scientific way [no anecdotal data, if you please!] that support an
association. This includes Dr. Torch's report."
So the cat was let out of the bag by Dr. Torch, who has been effectively
silenced by his colleagues since that memorable date. In his editorial
attacking "case reports" as a basis for evaluating vaccine
damage, Gerald Fenichel alluded to an ongoing study by the NIH on
"risk factors" in sudden infant death syndrome which, Fenichel
asserted, "excluded DPT as a causal
factor in sudden infant death syndrome."
Let us take a look at this study, published some years later as
"Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis Immunization and Sudden Infant Death:
Results of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Cooperative Epidemiological Study of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
Risk Factors," coauthored by: Howard J. Hoffman, Jehu Hunter, Karla
Damus, Jean Pakter, Donald R. Peterson, Gerald van Belle, and Eileen G.
Hasselmeyer (Pediatrics 79:4 [April, 1987], 598-611.
This "retrospective case-controlled study" involved finding 838
children whose deaths had been classified as SIDS by the attending
physician and/or the coroner and comparing them with 1514
"controls."
The 800 "cases" were selected from among all children who
died with a diagnosis of SIDS between October 1978, and December 1979, at
or near certain designated centers. Excluded from the group were: (1)
those on whom an autopsy was not performed or was performed with
deviations from the standard protocol, (2) those younger than 14 days or
older than 24 months, (3) those who died after more than 24 hours in a
hospital, and (4) those for whom the parents refused permission
to perform an autopsy.
The selection was made by a panel or panels of pathologists who examined
the records of the children's deaths and autopsies and who decided whether
or not the child had really died of SIDS or from some other cause.
There are two major objections to this procedure. The first is that the
"case" group contained some children who were vaccinated and
some who were not. The second is that we are not given the criteria by
which the panel of pathologists decided whether or not to include a
child as one of the "cases."
On the first objection, the investigators are searching for a tie with
vaccination in a group of 800+ infants, some vaccinated and others not.
This is contrary to common sense. Why water down the sample with babies
who were never vaccinated? At this point the whole methodology for
determining whether a previous vaccination may or may not have contributed
to the SIDS death in question rapidly becomes incoherent.
This leads to objection #2, which is that we are not given the criteria
according to which children were accepted as "cases" by the
panel of pathologists, and we cannot judge whether or not this was done
correctly.
A typical SIDS post-vaccination case would be the baby with a slight bacterial
or viral infection who is vaccinated and then dies of the infection. These
cases are invariably classified by attending physicians and coroners
as "death from an infection" without taking into account the
fact that vaccinations are known to lower resistance momentarily (for a
day or two).
In this state of lowered immunity the baby might well die from the
infection which would otherwise have been innocuous. So such a case would
not even be classified as SIDS (since the infectious "cause" is
known), and certainly not as "SIDS after a vaccination," even though
the baby would not have died in the absence of a vaccination. How many
such cases were rejected by
the "panel of pathologists"? We are not told.
The combination of (1) mixing vaccinated and unvaccinated babies with (2)
failure to provide the
criteria for acceptance into the "case" group taints this
same "case" group irredeemably and, in itself, should prevent
any further consideration of this study.
The next step in the investigation was to select two live
"controls" for each "case." Control A
was "matched" for age with the corresponding
"case," meaning that he or she was born as close as possible
to the same day. Control B was "matched" not only for
date or birth but also for birth weight and race. Again, as with the
"cases," these "controls" were mixed with respect to
vaccination status, some yes and some no.
The obvious criticism here is that date of birth is simply not relevant to
whether or not a baby is
vulnerable to the effects of a vaccine (unless the selection is
being made on astrological grounds!). Birth weight and race are slightly
more relevant, since children of low birth weight and black children (who
are more often of low birth weight than white children) are more
likely to be affected adversely by vaccination.
However, sex was not included as a criterion, even though males die of
SIDS, and are adversely affected by vaccinations, five times more
frequently than females. This was a peculiar oversight.
The only comment to be made about this "control" group is that
it was selected on entirely incomprehensible grounds. It stands to reason
that, when one group is being compared with another group, the two groups
must be "matched" with respect to the variable being
studied. In this case the variable being studied is "tendency to die
after receiving a vaccination. Date of birth has nothing at all to do with
this variable, whereas weight and race are only marginally related
to it. Sex of the baby, which is related, was not included in the
analysis.
Even though these two groups are not comparable, Drs. Hoffman et al.
compared them anyway, finding that "only" 39.8% of the
"cases" had received at least one DPT shot, while 55% of Control
A infants and 53.2% of Control B infants had received at least one
DPT shot. Since fewer "cases" than "controls" had
received the shot, the authors concluded that "DTP
immunization is not a significant [what do they mean by
"significant?"] factor in the occurrence of SIDS.
This sort of attempted comparison can only be described as a shambles, a
grotesque imitation of scientific method designed to fool the public (and
the journalists who are supposed to be monitoring precisely this
sort of intellectual dishonesty). It would have made as much sense to
interview the first 1600 people they could pick up in the Greyhound Bus
Station and ask them about their vaccination status.
But this article had its effect. Dr. Torch was effectively silenced, and
for years this pseudo-science
has been cited as one of the medical establishment's principal weapons in
its drive to extend childhood vaccination programs.
How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about
life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political
action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the
public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology
represented by articles like this one.
Another article on the SIDS-vaccination relationship, fortunately of far
superior quality, is Larry J.
Baraff, Wendy J. Ablon, and Robert C. Weiss, "Possible Temporal
Association Between Diphtheria-Tetanus Toxoid- Pertussis Vaccination and
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." (Pediatric Infectious Diseases 2:1
[January, 1983], 7-11). The authors adopted a simpler,
intuitively obvious method of investigation and concluded that there is, indeed,
a "temporal
association" between the DPT shot and sudden infant death.
They found that 382 cases of SIDS were recorded in Los Angeles County
between January 1, 1979, and August 23, 1980, and they simply interviewed
the parents of 145 of these cases, either in person or by telephone.
They asked: 1) the baby's sex, 2) the age at death, 3) the last visit
to a physician or nurse prior to death, 4) the date of the last
vaccination, 5) the name and telephone number of the physician or nurse,
and 6) the type of immunization given.
They found a statistically significant excess of deaths in the first day
and the first week after vaccination, i.e., a "temporal
association."
They rejected the use of a "control group," and instead relied
on the intuitively obvious assumption that "there should be no
temporal association between DPT immunization and SIDS were there no
causal relationship between these two events." I have not found
any criticism of this article for relying on "anecdotal evidence.
This study was not financed by the US Government but apparently by
the UCLA School of Medicine and the Los Angeles County Department of
Health Services.
Another respectable study of the SIDS-vaccination connection is
"Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussis Immunization and Suddent Infant Death
Syndrome" by Alexander M. Walker, Hershel Jick, David R. Perera,
Robert S. Thompson, and Thomas A. Knauss, published in the American
Journal of Public Health 77:8 [August, 1987], 945-951.
This study supports a link between the DPT shot and "sudden infant
death syndrome. The authors examined the records of all children born in
the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound between 1972 and 1983 to
see how many had died of SIDS. Total births recorded during
this period were 35,581, but of them only 26,500 were eligible for the
study. Not all deaths of infants during this period were considered to be
SIDS. All deaths which on the basis of death certificate diagnosis,
hospital discharge data, and pharmacy use taken together could be clearly
ascribed to causes not related to immunization were excluded."
Ultimately, "SIDS was defined as any death for which no cause
could be discerned among infants of normal birth weight and without
predisposing medical conditions. But, despite these exclusions and restrictions,
the authors found "the SIDS mortality rate in the period 0-3 days
following a DPT shot to be
7.3 times that in the period beginning 30 days after immunization.
They called the results of this study "worrisome" but consoled
themselves with the thought that "only a small proportion of SIDS
cases in infants with birth weights greater than 2500 grams could be
associated with DPT." A particular criticism to be made of this
study is that children with "predisposing medical conditions"
were excluded and their deaths were not considered to be
SIDS, whereas in actuality children with "predisposing medical
conditions" are routinely vaccinated.
Breaking News Archives - each day's breaking news from December 1, 2003 (check here for breaking news you might have missed and breaking news that didn't ever hit the "front page")
More News - all the news most recently posted on this website
All the News - a running tab of everything posted on this website since October 29, 2003
Top Stories Archives - daily breaking and other important news stories
Daily News Archives - all the news posted on this website each day (from April 2001)
Hot Topics - selected stories, by category
Return to Vaccination News Home Page (for best results, right click to "open in new window")
DISCLAIMER: All information, data, and material contained, presented, or provided here is for general information purposes only and is not to be construed as reflecting the knowledge or opinions of the publisher, and is not to be construed or intended as providing medical or legal advice. The decision whether or not to vaccinate is an important and complex issue and should be made by you, and you alone, in consultation with your health care provider.