History: Babies, Vaccines and Sudden Death

What this ER physician did not know.

---

About 20 years ago, when I was in medical school I remember attending a pediatrics lecture at Dalhousie medical school. What I remember from then was the professor mentioning 3 factors being associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in North America.

1) Poverty.

2) Smokers in the household.

3) Recent vaccination.

At that time, "Back to Sleep" (making infants sleep on their back), was all there was to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or so we were taught. Making sure babies had firm bedding and nothing nearby that could smother them was the "best" medical advice of the time. Little did we know that 25 years earlier, Japanese authorities reduced the sudden deaths following vaccination by 90%, by raising the age of vaccination from 3 months to 2 years [1]. In medical school I had the mistaken belief that protecting our youngest and most fragile patients was the number 1 priority for doctors and researchers around the world. After the lecture, I believed the link between childhood vaccination and sudden deaths was something that medical science would soon have answers to. I believed until now.

---

Continuing Medical Education - not what you think it is.

One of the means by which medical colleges all over North America maintain control of doctors is through "Continuing Medical Education" or CME. Ostensibly CME is to ensure quality of patient care, a way to keep licensed medical doctors "up to date" and only giving patients the most current treatments. Only "approved" educational programs are eligible for credit towards a physician's "Medical Education" requirement for maintaining their license. So a physician taking time to read medical research does not necessarily count towards confirmation of continued "medical competence", unless it is part of an “approved activity" as defined by his local medical board. In a typical doctor's life, time is already in short supply, and the effect of having to earn credits to keep one's license makes physicians judicious on how they use their time. Four hours spent reading journals versus four hours in an "approved" medical activity has the effect of biasing a physician’s time towards “board approved” education over independent research. Effectively this captures a physician's ongoing acquisition of knowledge and limits it to medical board "approved" information.

---

The Betrayal of Society

During my career and almost 2 decades of approved "Continuing Medical Education", I never again heard the link between vaccination and sudden infant deaths mentioned. After that one lecture in medical school, I trusted that the experts, the pediatricians and public health researchers would soon find an answer for us. While I learned about the latest emergency medicine research, how to reduce blood loss in trauma, hypothermia to prevent brain damage, emergency C-sections to save critical pregnant patients, maintaining and extending my expertise in emergencies, I believed my fellow experts in the pediatric societies and public health would apply their knowledge to get to the bottom of sudden deaths in the most important patient population in society. My expertise on saving their lives if they were dying from trauma, exchanged for their expertise on how to stop dead babies showing up in my ER. That was the social contract, or so I thought.

In my belief it would have been impossible for 2 decades of Continuing Medical Education to miss over half a century of data about unexpected deaths following vaccination.

And then I read this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8255173/

This landmark research paper was not a part of any medical college approved "learning activity". This article actually came across my eyes courtesy of Citizenfreepress.com, a mostly social and political news aggregator. Had the knowledge within this paper been applied 20 years ago, while I was still in medical school, or 50 years ago when the problem with vaccines and sudden infant deaths first became widely known around the world, how many infant lives could have been saved?

Had North America done what Japan had done in 1975, how many parents would have been spared the grief of finding their infant dead in the week following vaccination?

The social contract has been broken. My expertise is no longer there to save lives in the Emergency Department thanks to suspension of my license by the BC and Alberta Colleges. Perhaps the consequences of one less ER doctor may reach those who have perpetrated over half a century of harm. But many innocents have suffered and will suffer as well. Deaths in the waiting room, long ER wait times, and ER closures… these have all happened in the province of Alberta where I used to work. The unnecessary loss of life can only be stopped with truth, please share.

[1] Neil Z. Miller. Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature. Toxicol Rep. 2021; 8: 1324–1335.