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Polysorbate 80 in Vaccines: Is it safe?

Vaccines are loaded with ingredients that the average person doesn’t know much, if anything, about. We don’t know why any particular ingredient is needed in a vaccine, how that ingredient interacts with other vaccine ingredients, or how that ingredient will affect our bodies when it is injected. We assume that scientists who create vaccines know the answer to these important questions prior to licensing for public use. We assume our doctors have read all the scientific studies exhibiting the safety of the various vaccine ingredients prior to assuring us that any given vaccine is safe for us or our children. But, have the studies been done? Can these scientists and our doctors definitively answer these basic, yet necessary, questions about the safety of each ingredient?

We’ll talk about one such ingredient today- polysorbate 80. The CDC Vaccine Excipient and Media Summary lists Polysorbate 80 as an ingredient in the following vaccines:

    • DTaP (Infanrix)
    • DTaP – IPV (Kinrix and Quadracel)
    • DTaP- HepB- IPV (Pediarix)
    • DTaP- IPV- Hib (Pentacel)
    • HPV (Gardasil and Gardasil 9)
    • Influenza (Agriflu and Fluarix)
    • Meningococcal (MenB- Trumenba)
    • Pneumococcal (PCV13 – Prevnar 13)
    • Rotavirus (Rotateq)
    • TdaP (Boosterix)

What is polysorbate 80?

Polysorbate 80 is used as an emulsifier/stabilizer in vaccines, but you won’t find any safety information from CDC documents. It’s not listed on the CDC Ingredients of Vaccines Fact Sheet.

The Drugs.com definition states: “Polysorbate 80 is a common excipient and solubilizing agent used in the pharmaceutical industry. Polysorbate 80 (also known as polyoxyethylene-sorbitan-20 mono-oleate, or Tween 80) is used in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry in lotions, medical preparations (eg vitamin oils, vaccines, and intravenous preparations) and as an excipient in tablets. A solubilizing agent acts as a surfactant and increases the solubility of one agent into another. A substance that would not normally dissolve in a particular solution is able to dissolve with the use of a solubilizing agent.”

In other words, it allows the vaccine ingredients that normally behave like oil and water, to mix.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the soapbox for vaccine apologist, Dr. Paul Offit, (if you’ve never heard of Offit, he’s the chief of infectious disease at CHOP who famously said that babies could tolerate “10,000 vaccines at once” and who holds a $1.5 million research chair funded by Merck) lists the only “pediatrician” information I could find regarding the safety of polysorbate 80 in vaccines:

“The HPV vaccine contains polysorbate 80 as a stabilizer. Some stories on the internet have suggested that polysorbate 80 in this vaccine causes infertility. First, it is important to know that the HPV vaccine does not cause infertility. Second, polysorbate 80 has been used for years as an emulsifier to make ice cream smooth and to slow melting. A typical serving of ice cream (½ cup) may contain 170,000 micrograms of polysorbate 80. On the other hand, the amount of polysorbate 80 in each dose of the HPV vaccine- 50 micrograms- is very small. Therefore, polysorbate 80 isn’t contained in vaccines at quantities that could possibly do harm.”

Frankly, if the pediatrician has to appeal to the old “you eat it in your food and it hasn’t killed you, so you shouldn’t be worried about injecting it into your body” spiel, instead of offering up safety studies- it’s a red flag. The amount of polysorbate 80 in vaccines can’t possibly harm me? Cool- show me the studies that identify “safe” injectable levels. I’ll be waiting…

Is polysorbate 80 safe in our food?

It depends on what you consider “safe.” If by safe you merely mean that you don’t drop dead immediately from ingesting it, then polysorbate 80 fits that description. However, if you broaden your definition to include the long-term and cumulative risk of ingesting polysorbate 80, you may be interested in these studies:

  1. This study published in the American Academy of Cancer Research found that a diet including regular consumption of emulsifiers experienced exacerbated tumor development and chronic low-level inflammation. This chronic inflammation was also associated with inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and is observed in colorectal cancers. The study also points out that occurrence of colorectal cancers “have been markedly increasing since the mid-20th century.”
  1. This 2015 study also linked polysorbate 80 to gut inflammation, negatively altered gut bacteria (we now know that a healthy gut biome is necessary for immune function), obesity and metabolic syndromes.

If ingested polysorbate 80 is causing inflammation in the gut, is it a stretch to question if injected polysorbate 80 is causing inflammation (a hallmark of autoimmune disease) elsewhere in the body?

There is no shortage of troubling information about polysorbate 80 in vaccines:

  1. They don’t have enough data to answer basic safety questions.

    – The Science Lab Material Data Sheet for polysorbate 80 highlights my point. Section 3 of this report lists the potential chronic health effects. Carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic effects as well as the developmental toxicity are all “unavailable.” (Synonym for “unknown”?) However, section 11 states these special remarks on the chronic effects on humans:

    “May cause adverse reproductive effects based on animal test data. No human data found. May cause cancer based on animal test data. No human data found. May affect genetic material (mutagenic).” Under the special remarks on other toxic effects on humans is stated, “Animal studies have shown it to cause cardiac changes, changes in behavior (altered sleep time) and weight loss (upon repeated or prolonged ingestion.) However, no similar human data has been reported.”

    – Of course, injected polysorbate 80 isn’t discussed in this report at all. If you’re like me, there are way too many statements of “no human data found” for comfort.

  1. Polysorbate 80 may allow other vaccine ingredients to cross the blood brain barrier.

    • This is huge- as in a total game changer. In fact, it is used in other medications for that very purpose. Dr. Lawrence Palevsky points out:

      “Polysorbate 80 is used as an emulsifier by the pharmaceutical industry to enhance the delivery of chemicals/drugs from the blood into the brain across the blood brain barrier (BBB). Being that the BBB is impermeable to many things in the bloodstream, researchers needed to find a way to deliver chemicals/drugs into the brain from the bloodstream in order to treat hard-to-reach brain infections/lesions/tumors, etc. Polysorbate 80 is one such chemical that helps in this delivery.”

    • This Science Direct link discusses the role of polysorbate 80 in crossing the BBB: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014296120300855X Could polysorbate 80 be allowing other vaccine ingredients (some of which are known neurotoxins) such as aluminum, mercury, bacterial/viral/yeast protein antigens which would be harmful to the brain, to cross the BBB?
  1. Injected polysorbate 80 metabolizes into chemicals that are much more toxic than the original chemical.
      • These studies show that after injection polysorbate 80 breaks down into sorbitol and ethylene oxide. The NIH toxicology network states that sorbitol is “not to be injected,” and that ethylene oxide is a “known carcinogen,” among other concerning toxicity information.
  1. Polysorbate 80 has been linked to infertility.
    • In this study, baby female rates were injected with polysorbate 80 at days 4-7 after birth which resulted in their accelerated maturation, caused changes to the vagina and womb lining, hormonal changes, ovary deformities and degenerative follicles.
    • This study researching the link between the HPV vaccine and infertility cited the findings of the rat study above and notes insufficient and poorly designed research on fertility effects in clinical trials for the HPV vaccine. If you’ll recall, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) quote above claims that there is no link between the HPV vaccine and infertility. However, this study states unequivocally that this claim cannot be asserted:

      “The relevance of polysorbate 80 ovarian damage to the cases presented here is unresearched and unknown and assurances of ‘no biologically plausible’ link between HPV4 vaccine and ovarian effects cannot be given.” (emphasis mine)

    • If you’ll recall, CHOP also drew a comparison to ingested polysorbate 80. This study also addresses fertility effects of ingested polysorbate 80:

      “The chemical is present in orally ingested medicines and foods, but did not affect rat reproduction when subject to digestive processes at up to 5% of their oral intake. It did decrease rat reproduction at 20% of their oral intake.”

    • Sounds like CHOP is comfortable making claims that actual scientists researching the HPV vaccine will not make.
    • As an interesting and possibly relevant side note, a patent for a vaccine that would decrease animal fertility has been submitted by the University of Georgia Research Foundation. This patent lists polysorbate 80 as a preferable ingredient: “and additionally preferably contains Tween 80 (polysorbate 80).” According to the patent “Background of the Invention” section, this vaccine is an effort to controlling dog overpopulation. Another quote from the patent:

      “Collegenase treatment of zona pellucida proteins known to alter the proteins in a way that can be demonstrated immunocytochemically. Abnormal estrus cycles, characterized by constant or prolonged estrus, and other deleterious side effects, such as ovarian cyst formation, were found to be associated with the vaccinations (C. Mahi-Brown, Am. J. Reprod. Immunol. Microbiol..18,94-103 (1988)), and were never satisfactorily explained.” (emphasis mine)

      • Those phrases in bold echo findings in the polysorbate 80 rat study linked above.
  1. Injected polysorbate 80 has been identified as the cause of anaphylaxis.
    • The study, Anaphylaxis Due to the Excipient Polysorbate 80, appeared in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in December of 2005. (page 21 on the pdf linked above) “In our conclusion, based on our results and the literature reviewed, we believe that polysorbate 80 should be included in the test battery for allergy to medications such as corticosteroids, since it could be a cause of anaphylaxis of unknown etiology.”
    • The NIH link for this study notes, “Polysorbate 80 is a ubiquitously used solubilizing agent that can cause severe nonimmunologic anaphylactoid reactions.”
  1. Can injected polysorbate 80 negatively affect our immune system?
    • In addition to its role as an emulsifier/stabilizer, polysorbate 80 also functions as a vaccine detergent. Detergents are used in killed virus vaccines (such as the flu vaccine) to split or disrupt the virus particles. Detergents cause cells to leak or explode by weakening their cell walls. The danger is that this process mimics our bodies’ membrane attack complex, or MAC. This link explains in detail why this is so dangerous: http://www.sailhome.org/Concerns/Vaccines/MAC.html
      • A “cliff’s notes” version of the article above:
        • “The Complement system is a chain-reaction of biochemical events that help remove pathogens from the body…The Membrane Attack Complex (MAC) is part of the Complement system- and it is one of the immune system’s ultimate weapons…Killing cells by punching holes into them makes the MAC extremely potent- and also extremely destructive if it runs out of control. For this reason the MAC (and the Complement system in general) is tightly regulated by additional proteins.”
      • “When activated, the Complement system triggers such events as: increased arachidonic acid metabolism leading to acute inflammation and damage to nearby tissue; histamine release with its effects on allergic response, digestion, and neurotransmitter function; pyrogen release and the onset of fever.”
      • “Detergents represent the worst kind of autoimmune dysfunction- they randomly destroy any kind of host cell with no mechanism for regulating destructive activity.”
      • A troubling comparison of the characteristics of MAC vs vaccine detergents:
              1. Both cause cells to leak or explode.
              2. MAC is “regulated by proteins”, whereas detergents are completely unregulated. “like the MAC out of control.”
              3. MAC “targets foreign cells and avoids self-cells”, while detergents “hit cells randomly”.
              4. MAC “responds to signals calling off the attack”, but detergents “continue to destroy cells.”
              5. MAC is “integrated into complex (and sensitive) signaling and feedback relationships”, however detergents are both “foreign” and “disruptive” to these systems.

Should we be comfortable with polysorbate 80 as a vaccine ingredient?

For me, the answer is an emphatic no- until scientists can adequately exhibit favorable answers to Dr. Palevsky’s following questions:

  1. What vaccine materials get across the BBB, with the help of polysorbate 80, into the brain of children? And
  2. What effect do they have once they get into the brain? Do they contribute to inflammation, toxicity, encephalitis?

Since polysorbate 80 works as an emulsifier, and will also enhance delivery of vaccine materials into the rest of the cells of the body,

  1. What vaccine materials enter the cells of our bodies?
  2. Do they remain in the cells once they get there?
  3. Do they impair any parts of the cells, its mitochondrial DNA, nuclear DNA, or other cellular apparatuses- endoplasmic reticulum, golgi apparatus?
  4. Do they become part of the DNA of the cells since there are whole DNA strands from live viruses in the vaccines, along with foreign animal DNA and bacterial/viral/yeast protein antigens?
  5. If they do become part of the DNA, how does this change the function and/or regulatory systems in the cells?
  6. Do the materials from vaccines (eg aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde) entering through the cell membranes at the hands of polysorbate 80 do anything to impair the electrical charge of the cell membrane, or impair/alter the way materials enter or exit the cell through the cell membrane (nutrients, cellular wastes, manufactured proteins, or enzymes?)

Since babies have a poorly developed BBB, which may not solidify for at least the first 6 months, or maybe longer if they have a brewing inflammatory condition yet to be determined that has delayed the full development of the BBB, then questions 3-8 apply to their brains as well.

Until we have studies providing answers to these questions, don’t let anyone tell you “Well, your polysorbate 80 loaded ice cream hasn’t killed you yet, so the small amount in these vaccines is probably ok too.” If you’re like me, you believe our children require proof- not a “probably.”

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Why Did the CDC Silence the Million Dollar Harvard Project Charged With Upgrading Our Vaccine Safety Surveillance System?

There are major problems with the vaccine adverse event reporting system (known as VAERS) which the CDC considers the “front line” of vaccine safety. VAERS was created in 1990 by the CDC and FDA as a means to collect and analyze adverse effects that are associated with vaccines. Unfortunately, the failings of VAERS are “kept from the consciousness” not only of the public, but also from the doctors, pediatricians, and nurses that the public rely on to provide reliable information as to the safety of vaccines. I say “kept from the consciousness” rather than “kept secret” because while these failings are publicly disclosed for all the world to see, they are for all intents and purposes BURIED in documents seldom searched out by the average member of the medical community, much less by the average individual. You could say that the information has been very effectively hidden in plain sight.

By far, the most dire failure of the VAERS system is the vast underreporting of vaccine adverse effects which leads to a dangerous false security in vaccine safety and an erroneous assumption that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks.

Who DOES know about the deadly elephant in the room?

The CDC, the FDA, the Institutes of Medicine (IOM), and Congress to name a few. Oh, and an organization called Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Inc.- but we’ll get to them in a minute.

This is what the CDC says about the VAERS system, “Passive surveillance systems (e.g. VAERS) are subject to multiple limitations, including underreporting, reporting of temporal associations or unconfirmed diagnoses, and lack of denominator data and unbiased comparison groups. Because of these limitations, determining causal associations between vaccines and adverse events from VAERS reports is usually not possible.” (emphasis mine)

In 2000, the 6th Report by the Committee on Government Reform addressed the failings of VAERS in its address of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The report states, “The quality of VAERS data has been questioned. Because reports are submitted from a variety of sources, some inexperienced in completing data forms for medical studies, many reports omit important data and contain obvious errors. Assessment is further complicated by the administration of multiple vaccines at the same time, following currently recommended vaccine schedules, because there may be no conclusive way to determine which vaccine or combination of vaccines caused the specific adverse event.”

The same Congressional report notes (on page 15), “Former FDA commissioner David A. Kessler has estimated that VAERS reports currently represent only a fraction of the serious adverse events.” (emphasis mine)

The Congressional report above listed 4 limitations that the IOM Committees noted, “1) Inadequate understanding of biologic mechanisms underlying adverse events; 2) Insufficient or inconsistent information from case reports and case series; 3) Inadequate size or length of follow- up of many population- based epidemiological studies; 4) Limitations of existing surveillance systems to provide persuasive evidence of causation; and 5) Few published epidemiological studies.” The report continues by noting that the “IOM warned that ‘if research capacity and accomplishments [are] not improved, future reviews of vaccine safety [will be] similarly handicapped.’”

The IOM has been telling the CDC for over 23 years that they have inadequate information (and none at all in some cases) to advise on the causal relationship between vaccines and adverse events for a majority of adverse events reported. In a 1994 report on vaccines and adverse events the IOM stated, “The lack of adequate data regarding many of the adverse events under study was of major concern to the committee…Although the committee was not charged with proposing specific research investigations, in the course of its review additional obvious needs for research and surveillance were identified, and those are briefly described here.” (emphasis mine) In 2011, the IOM conducted another study examining the scientific evidence in studies available for 158 vaccine adverse effects. Again, they concluded that they had inadequate information to come to a decision, “The vast majority of causality conclusions in the report are the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship.” (emphasis mine)

While one might expect a new program (new in 1990) to have a few bugs that need to be worked out, I would expect that when it comes to being able to ascertain vaccine safety, working out those bugs should be priority number one. Certainly today in 2017, a whopping 27 years later, the failure of the CDC to address this monumental danger to public health should be viewed with a skepticism much greater than mere suspicion.

That leads us to the interesting case of the CDC and Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Inc.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gave Harvard Medical School a $1 million dollar grant to track VAERS reporting at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare for 3 years and to create an automated reporting system which would revolutionize the VAERS reporting system- transforming it from “passive” to “active.”

This project was called Electronic Support for Public Heath- Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (ESP:VAERS). According to the grant final report, the scope of the project was, “To create a generalizable system to facilitate detection and clinician reporting of vaccine adverse events, in order to improve the safety of national vaccination programs.” To accomplish this the team used the electronic medical records at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Inc, which is described as a “large multi-specialty practice.” Every patient that received a vaccine was automatically identified and followed for 30 days. Within that 30 days the individual’s diagnostic health codes, lab tests, and prescriptions were evaluated to recognize any potential adverse event. Another goal of the project was to evaluate the performance of the new automated system via a randomized trial and to compare this new data to the existing data collected by VAERS and Vaccine Safety Datalink.

Just the preliminary description of this program is head and shoulders above the current functioning of the passive VAERS system. In our current system, adverse events are to be spontaneously reported by parents or health care providers. Most parents aren’t even aware the VAERS system exists, much less aware that they are supposed to be reporting to it. Health care providers are “supposed” to report adverse events, but we have no idea of the efficiency level with which this is occurring, and more than a hunch that this reporting is grossly neglected for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, many vaccine adverse events are never reported because either the parent, patient, or doctor is completely unaware that a subsequent adverse event is in fact due to a vaccine. This new reporting system would remove all of these failures from the equation.

What were the results?

Data was collected from June 2006 to October of 2009 on a total of 715,000 patients. Of those 715,000 patients, 376,452 were given 1.4 million doses of 45 different vaccines. A total of 35,570 possible adverse reactions were identified, so 2.6% of vaccinations were followed by a possible adverse reaction.

Let’s just take a minute to reflect on that last sentence. Out of only 376,452 individuals that received a vaccine at this Harvard practice, the new automated system identified 35,570 possible adverse reactions in a three year period. How does that stack up to the number of adverse effects reported to VAERS? According to the CDC, only 30,000 adverse events are reported every year for the entire US population. This finding alone should have had the CDC saying:

I’ll quote the findings directly from the report, “Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. […] Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of ‘problem’ drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed.”

Again, let’s stop and think about this revelation for a moment: fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. The CDC’s entire vaccination propaganda campaign rests on their claim that side effects from vaccination are exceedingly rare (and predominantly minor). According to the CDC, in 2016 alone, VAERS received 59,117 vaccine adverse event reports. Among those reports were 432 deaths, 1,091 permanent disabilities, 4,132 hospitalizations, and 10,274 emergency room visits. What if these numbers actually represent less than 1% of the total as this report asserts? Simple multiplication would yield vaccine adverse events reports numbering 5,911,700!

Of course, at this point that figure is nothing but a guess. But, again, why do we HAVE To guess? Because in 27 years the CDC has failed to provide a post- licensure vaccine safety surveillance system that the IOM, FDA, physicians, and the public can have confidence in.

The report also states, “Barriers to reporting include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part of the clinician’s usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative.

So, WHY aren’t the reports currently being made to VAERS? According to the findings above, clinicians don’t know for sure what a vaccine adverse event is. This isn’t surprising at all considering what we learned from the 2011 IOM report above. There haven’t been enough studies performed for highly trained IOM scientists and physicians to even determine whether or not the majority of the currently suspected 158 adverse vaccine effects are indeed caused by vaccines. How could we possibly expect our average pediatricians or general practitioners to know what a team of IOM personnel have determined we have inadequate information to decide? In addition, this report basically finds that your clinician frankly doesn’t have the time to devote to proper VAERS reporting under the current inconvenient system.

You’d think that the CDC would be jumping for joy that this Harvard team just created a proactive, reliable, automated system that would improve the quality of our vaccination program by improving vaccine adverse event detection thereby increasing public confidence in post- licensure surveillance.

What was the CDC’s response?

Basically, the same response your average college student falls back on when they decide they are no longer interested in continuing a relationship- they cut all lines of communication. No more answering phone calls or emails. You heard me correctly, the United States of America Centers for Disease Control ghosted Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Inc. For those who are unaware, Google dictionary defines ghosting as, “the practice of ending a personal relationship by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.” Personally, I would hope that I could hold an organization like the CDC to a higher standard, but…

After a one million dollar grant was paid and three years of research conducted on what appeared to be a very successful upgrade to the passive VAERS system, the team’s CDC contacts went MIA. The ESP:VAERS final report states, “Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.”

According to the final report, the only thing left for the CDC to do was link the VAERS system to the Harvard Pilgrim system in order to transmit the data. The team requested that the CDC do this, “However, real data transmissions of non-physician approved reports to the CDC was unable to commence, as by the end of this project, the CDC had yet to respond to multiple requests to partner for this activity.”

What do we, the public, take away from this debacle?

As I see it there are only two options.

  1. You give the CDC the benefit of the doubt, assume deep down they have the safety of the public at heart and chalk up their monumental waste of money, time, and a good idea to bureaucratic incompetence.
  2. You stop naively believing that the CDC cares ultimately about public safety and realize that the vaccine industry makes way too much money to allow public confidence in the safety of vaccines to be eroded by a surveillance system capable of giving the public a glimpse of the scope and magnitude of the adverse effects vaccines are actually responsible for.

To assist you in your decision making, I’ll leave you with a statistic from the ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network) request to the HHS to meet the obligations set forth by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Safety Act regarding the CDC’s role in the vaccine industry market, “When the CDC recommends a pediatric vaccine for universal use, it creates for that vaccine’s maker a liability free market of 78 million children typically required by law to receive the vaccine.” (emphasis mine)

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SIDS or Vaccine Induced Death? What Does the Evidence Say?

Did you know that according to the 2016 CIA World Factbook Infant Mortality Rate Country Comparison, a whopping 56 countries have lower infant mortality rates than the US? That number is up from 2009 when only 34 countries had lower rates.

The CDC recognizes that the skyrocketing IMR (infant mortality rate) in the US has been a trend for quite some time. In fact, this 2008 CDC study, Recent Trends in Infant Mortality in the United States reveals, “The US infant mortality rate is higher than those in most other developed countries, and the gap between the US infant mortality rate and the rates for the countries with the lowest infant mortality appears to be widening.” Comparing the 2009 and 2016 IMR data is frankly astounding. It clearly reveals that something the US is doing differently than other developed countries is causing our babies to die.

In 2011, Neil Miller and Gary Goldman published a study, (using the 2009 infant mortality data) in which they researched this phenomenon. One health policy in particular that differs among developed countries is the child immunization schedule. The US vaccination schedule requires more vaccines before age 1 than any other country. This correlation certainly calls for research which is exactly what Miller and Goldman set out to do. The Miller/Goldman study compared the data and concluded, “…nations that require more vaccine doses tend to have higher infant mortality rates.”

How exactly are babies in the US dying?

We know that babies in the US are dying, but what are they dying of? According to the CDC the third leading cause of infant death is SIDS. This 2005 study in Pediatrics states, “Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) makes up the largest component of sudden unexpected infant death in the United States.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us. Odds are, you know someone or have heard of someone who had a beautiful, perfectly healthy baby that tragically and suddenly died for a completely unexplainable reason. Those types of stories didn’t use to be very common, but these days we are hearing this heartbreaking tale far too often.

The National Institutes of Health defines SIDS as, “the sudden, unexplained death of a baby younger than 1 year of age that doesn’t have a known cause even after a complete investigation. This investigation includes performing a complete autopsy, examining the death scene, and reviewing the clinical history.” The NIH SIDS fast fact page includes, “Most SIDS deaths occur in babies between 1 month and 4 months of age.”

What you might NOT know, is that prior to 1969, the term “SIDS” didn’t even exist.  As a matter of fact, the term wasn’t coined until 1969 in response to rising unexplainable infant death. According to the Miller/Goldman study, prior to the advent of the national immunization campaign in the 60’s, what was then referred to as “crib death” was so infrequent that it wasn’t even listed in the infant mortality statistics. Referring to the national immunization campaign in the 60’s Miller/Goldman write, “For the first time in history, most US infants were required to receive several doses of DPT, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines…In 1973, the National Center for Health Statistics added a new cause-of-death category—for SIDS—to the ICD (international classification of diseases.)”

How did the government/pediatric medical community respond to exploding SIDS rates?

Miller/Goldman explain that, “In 1992, to address the unacceptable SIDS rate, the American Academy of Pediatrics initiated a ‘Back to Sleep’ campaign, convincing parents to place their infants supine, rather than prone, during sleep.”

All women who have become mothers since the 90’s know all about this. We are told relentlessly not to co-sleep, to ALWAYS place babies on their backs to sleep, remove all blankets and toys from cribs, no more crib bumpers, etc. But, have all of these precautions decreased infant mortality from SIDS? The CDC tells us that it has decreased the SIDS rate dramatically. Here is the CDC graph touting the success of the “Back to Sleep” campaign. It certainly appears effective.

Did SIDS rates really fall or are these statistics smoke and mirrors?

Unfortunately, a closer examination reveals that these CDC statistics are a blatant attempt to mislead the public through reclassification of deaths. Infant deaths that would have been categorized as SIDS prior to the Back to Sleep campaign began being classified in new categories, leading to the false public perception that unexplained infant mortality was actually decreasing.

Here is a CDC pie graph illustrating infant death in 2015. Notice there are now 3 “top” categories for SIDS (in actuality there are multiple new sudden unexplained death categories, but most deaths fall into these top 3):

This 2005 study in Pediatrics revealed, “ …for the period from 1999 to 2001 there was no significant change in the overall postneonatal mortality rate, whereas the postnatal SIDS rate declined by 17.4%. Concurrent increases in postneonatal mortality rates for unknown and unspecified causes and suffocation account for 90% of the decrease in the SIDS rate between 1999 and 2001.” (emphasis mine)

The CDC is clearly engaging in very manipulative and misleading behavior. The Miller/Goldman study includes this graph depicting the data. Notice that the overall infant mortality rate from 99-01 is relatively constant. Only the reported SIDS deaths decline, because they are being re-categorized.

This report published in Pediatrics in 2011 states, “Between 1984 and 2004, ASSB (accidental suffocation and strangulation in bedding) infant mortality rates more than quadrupled, from 2.8 to 12.5 deaths per 100,000 live births, which represents 513 infant deaths attributed to ASSB in 2004 compared with 103 in 1984.”

This article in Parenting magazine reveals one such case of “code shifting” leaving one to wonder just how underreported SIDS deaths have become. Melissa Haberzetti’s perfectly healthy, 3 month old son Jacob passed away in what the coroner originally assessed as a SIDS death. However, after the autopsy, the coroner changed Jacob’s cause of death to viral pneumonia, even though he had never exhibited any signs of illness. Melissa sought a second opinion from a SIDS researcher at Children’s Hospital in San Diego who agreed that the local coroner had incorrectly categorized an obvious SIDS death. He stated, “With viral pneumonia, infants don’t die suddenly without getting sick first…If one has a degree of pneumonia that can be seen only with a microscope, and then the infant dies, he dies with it, not of it.”

Now that we have established that the Back to Sleep campaign is not having an effect on SIDS death, let’s move on to what the CDC says with regard to SIDS and infant vaccination.

What does the CDC say about SIDS and vaccination?

The official CDC statement reads, “Babies receive many vaccines when they are between 2 to 4 months old. This age range is also the peak age for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), or infant death that cannot be explained. 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.”

The CDC provides reviews of these studies, but upon examination a disturbing trend emerges. Many of the reviewers seem to have a conflict of interest. For example, in this report, reviewer Gina T. Mootrey works for the CDC Vaccine and Development Branch; in this study, two reviewers- Thea K. Fischer and Katrin S. Kohl, work for the CDC; this Immunization Safety Review conducted by the Institutes of Medicine states in its introduction, “Support for this project was provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…” Conflict of interest = unreliable conclusions.

Conversely, there are multiple independent studies linking vaccines to SIDS. Here’s a sampling:

This Torch study, Evidence Concerning Pertussis Vaccines and Deaths Classified as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, concluded that the DPT vaccine, “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 re-evaluation and possible modification of current vaccination procedures is indicated by this study.” What led Torch to come to this conclusion? The Miller/Goldman study explains, “Torch found that two-thirds of babies who had died from SIDS had been vaccinated against DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus toxoid) prior to death. Of these, 6.5% died within 12 hours of vaccination; 13% within 24 hours; 26% within 3 days; and 37%, 61%, and 70% within 1, 2, and 3 weeks, respectively. Torch also found that unvaccinated babies who died of SIDS did so most often in the fall or winter while vaccinated babies died most often at 2 and 4 months- the same ages when initial doses of DPT were given to infants.”

This study in the Journal of Pediatrics, Adverse Events following Haemophilus influenzae Type b Vaccines in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 1990-2013 states, “VAERS received 29,747 reports after Hib vaccines; 5179 (17%) were serious, including 896 reports of deaths.[…] Sudden infant death syndrome was the stated cause of death in 384 (51%) of 749 death reports with autopsy/death certificate records.”

The study, “Unexplained cases of sudden infant death shortly after hexavalent vaccination,” published in Science Direct notes, “possible fatal complications after application of hexavalent vaccines.”

The 2011 study, “A modified self-controlled case series method to examine association between multidose vaccinations and death” concluded that based on a review of 300 sudden unexplained deaths occurring after a pentavalent or hexavalent vaccination, “a 16-fold increase after the 4th dose could be detected with a power of at least 90 percent. A general 2-fold risk increase after vaccination could be detected with a power of 80 percent.”

Equally telling, however, is the fact that the government program set up to compensate victims of vaccine injury (VICP) compensated parents over $60 million for SIDS deaths from 1990-1998. Records obtained from the NVICP by the Gannett News Service via the freedom of information act for a 4 month study show, “Of 253 infant death cases awarded more than $61 million by the US Court of Federal Claims in the 1990s under the compensation program, 224, or 86 percent, were attributed to vaccination with DTP, […] In these cases, mortality was originally attributed to SIDS in 90, or 40 percent, of them…Of 771 total claims filed by parents from 1990 through mid-1998, 660, or 86 percent, contained assertions that DTP was the cause of death. And 43 percent were classified by medical authorities at time of death as SIDS cases.” (John Hanchette and Sunny Kaplan, “Vaccination Nation: Children on the Frontline” Gannett News Service, 1998)

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Despite CDC efforts to trivialize the obvious correlation between the heavy handed US infant immunization schedule (primarily at the 2 and 4 month mark) and the corresponding spike of “totally unexplainable” infant deaths ruled as “SIDS” in the exact same months, the evidence is clear. In my opinion and (more importantly) in the opinions of numerous doctors and scientists, the CDC’s attempt to sell the concept of “correlation does not indicate causation” has fallen flat. Renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Russell Blaylock sums up the CDC/vaccine/SIDS relationship perfectly in his preface to Neil Miller’s book “Vaccine Safety Manual,” “In order to avoid admitting that the sudden stoppage of breathing by a baby within hours to weeks of these vaccines was due to the vaccines, the vaccine defender merely created a new disease a gave it the incredible name of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), which is like naming it the ‘Baby Mysteriously Die of Anything but a Vaccine Injury Syndrome’ (BMDAVIS).”