Vaccines and SIDS

"We do not have the data that would definitively answer all questions about links between vaccines and SIDS and other forms of sudden, unexpected death in infancy. However, we believe that the data we do have, along with the increasing rarity of these kinds of infant deaths, make a review of the vaccine schedule unnecessary."
~Marie McCormick, chair of the committee that wrote the report from the Institute of Medicine and professor and chair, Department of Maternal and Child Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston.

Excerpts from the report as reprinted in this press release read:

"...Because the currently used DTaP vaccine has fewer side effects than DTwP, the committee found no reason to suspect any link between DTaP and SIDS. However, without sufficient or adequate evidence available, the committee could not definitively reject a link between DTaP and SIDS. Evidence was also insufficient or inadequate to determine whether relationships exist between other individual vaccines and SIDS.

...While the number and variety of vaccines infants receive is not linked to SIDS, there is not enough evidence to determine whether exposure to multiple different vaccines is causally linked to SUDI in general. Evidence also is not sufficient or adequate to determine if HepB, the only vaccine given to newborns, is linked to neonatal deaths, the report says."

Yet organizations such as the American SIDS Institute go on to report that: "The report of the Institute of Medicine once again confirmed that there is no reason to believe that vaccines routinely given to infants during their first year of life contribute to an increased risk of sudden infant death syndrome, sudden unexpected death in infancy, or neonatal death."

That statement was never made in the report. In fact, if anything, the report should show that there is greater reason for concern because of the inability of the committee to rule out a link between vaccines and SIDS. Confirmation of a lack of risk would be the ability to show that SIDS is conclusively unrelated to vaccines. The report explicitly states that there is not enough evidence to make that statement.

As Dawn Winkler, former Vice President of Concerned Parents for Vaccine Safety, points out, "The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has even compensated 93 families whose infants' deaths were labeled SIDS because the parent had the evidence in the autopsy to prove the vaccine caused it. Yet, the cause of death listing as "SIDS" was never changed on the death certificates of these 93 babies." (Winkler 2000)