Tag: SIDS

The Latest Anti-Vaccine Bombshell on Infanrix Hexa is Just Another Dud

There are a lot of things about the latest anti-vaccine bombshell that won’t surprise you…

For one thing, the “bombshell” isn’t recent. Anti-vaccine folks are just re-posting it now because a new hexavalent vaccine just got FDA approval.

The Latest Anti-Vaccine Bombshell on Infanrix Hexa is Just Another Dud

What about the 1,271 page confidential GSK document that was leaked to the press?

It was actually a document that was submitted as part of an Italian court case.

What about the idea of “missing deaths” and under-reporting of vaccine deaths?

“Before specifically addressing your analysis, it’s important to note that the issue of whether there is an increased risk of Sudden Infant Death following vaccination generally and following vaccination with DTP-containing vaccines more specifically is one that has been considered and thoroughly evaluated not only by GSK but also by a number of world-renowned regulatory agencies and public health authorities, including the European Medicines Agency, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. The clear consensus amongst such agencies and authorities is that one cannot reasonably conclude, based on available data and information, that there is a causal relationship between vaccination generally or vaccination with Infanrix hexa and Sudden Infant Death.”

Dr. Norman Begg, Chief Medical Officer, GSK Vaccines on Infanrix hexa and sudden death: a review of the periodic safety update reports submitted to the European Medicines Agency

It’s no bombshell that this is all propaganda and these issues have been thoroughly investigated. Or that someone got a “study” that manipulated and misinterpreted data published in a predatory journal.

The idea that the hexavalent vaccines could be causing unexplained cases of sudden infant death shortly after vaccination began after a few case reports from Germany in 2003. Further studies, including a large study in Italy, found no risk.

What about the idea of “missing deaths” in safety reports from the manufacturer?

If there are so many "missing deaths," then why is the cumulative number of deaths higher in the latest report?
If there are so many “missing deaths,” then why is the cumulative number of deaths higher in the latest report?

Of course, there are no missing deaths.

I found the “missing deaths” that Puliyel talks about in his Infanrix hexa paper – in the GSK report he used to write his “study.”

The GSK report explains that twelve deaths were excluded from analysis, apparently eight from the first year (101 cumulative) and three from the second year (five cumulative), which is why the cumulative deaths dropped from eight to five.

Why?

“A cumulative review of Sudden Death (SD) since launch has been performed. Follow-up information received for older cases was taken into account. Design of the below observed to expected analysis was revisited in view of comments EMA expressed in the assessment report of PSUR 15-16 (dated 26 April 2012).”

GlaxoSmithKline Biological clinical safety and pharmacovigilance’s confidential report to the EMA: PSUR 19, page 440

Keep in mind that these are cumulative deaths since they began using the vaccine in 2000, and which are below the expected background rates of SIDS.

Vaccines are safe.

Hexavalent vaccines are safe.

Do your research before buying into the next anti-vaccine bombshell that try to throw at you to scare you away from vaccinating and protecting your kids.

More on the Latest Anti-Vaccine Bombshell

Making the Right Choice About Vaccines

Most parents vaccinate their kids.

For them, it is an easy choice. They know that vaccines work, that vaccines are safe, and that vaccines are necessary.

Making the Right Choice About Vaccines

Some folks aren’t so sure though. They may either be against vaccines or might still be on the fence, not knowing for sure what to do.

“When my third child was born, I had more questions than answers and a huge reluctance to choose immunizations without certainty that the benefits outweigh the risks.”

Suzanne Walther on A Parent’s Decision on Immunization: Making the Right Choice

Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo when he took his daughter to their pediatrician for vaccines.
Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo when he took his daughter to their pediatrician for her vaccines.

Parents can be confident that all of the evidence points to the facts that:

  1. Vaccines are effective at preventing disease. Vaccines work.
  2. Our kids do not get too many vaccines and do not get them at too early an age. The current immunization schedule helps protect young children from life-threatening diseases. Vaccines are necessary.
  3. Vaccines are safe and are extensively tested before they are approved.
  4. After they are approved, there are ongoing clinical trials and safety systems in place to rule out the possibility that vaccines could cause diseases later in life.
  5. Claims of adverse reactions are well investigated and easily disproved. Vaccines are not associated with SIDS, ADHD, eczema, autism, peanut allergies, or any other so-called vaccine induced diseases.
  6. There are plenty of places to go to get truthful, clear answers to questions about vaccines.
  7. Everything you hear that scares you about vaccines is likely not true, especially things about toxins, shedding, herd immunity, and package inserts, etc.

With all of the anti-vaccine information that is regularly posted on Facebook and anti-vaccine books listed on Amazon, it is no surprise that some parents would be scared though.

“I have discovered along the way that it is easy for parents to be misinformed. It is a real challenge to be well informed.”

Suzanne Walther on A Parent’s Decision on Immunization: Making the Right Choice

Make the effort to be well informed about vaccines.

More on Making the Right Choice About Vaccines

Vaccine Injuries vs Coincidences

Believe it or not, some folks don’t think that coincidences are real.

Not believing in coincidences is a well known trope of the anti-vaccine movement.
Not believing in coincidences is a well known trope of the anti-vaccine movement.

Is it a coincidence that these folks are the ones who are the most likely to believe that vaccines cause a lot of injuries and vaccine induced diseases?

Vaccine Injuries vs Coincidences

Thinking about vaccine side effects and coincidences is not new.

“When I undertook the study with the current vaccine strain on my own two triple-negative children and their three playmates, also triple- negatives, I thought: “I am going to do this very carefully now,” and, like Dr. Gear, I set up certain time schedules. I said: “I am going to start to give the vaccine now.” Every time I said “I am going to start to give it” and did not give it, two to three or four days later they came down with either pharyngitis, vomiting and abdominal pain, or a little fever.

I waited for approximately six weeks for those children to stop having some sort of febrile episode. I finally gave up. It so happened that after they got the vaccine they did not have any such episode.”

Albert Sabin on Recent Studies And Field Tests With A Live Attenuated Poliovirus Vaccine

When Albert Sabin was first researching his oral polio vaccine, he understood the problem. How could he really know if any signs or symptoms that occurred after he gave someone his vaccine were really caused by the vaccine, or just a coincidence?

“However, a report later to be given by Dr. Smorodintsev will deal with approximately 7,500 children who had received the vaccine and were carefully followed, as compared with another group, in similar number, who had not, for various types of illnesses which were occurring during the period.”

Albert Sabin on Recent Studies And Field Tests With A Live Attenuated Poliovirus Vaccine

The solution? They studied kids who had not gotten his vaccine.

But you don’t need an unvaccinated group to uncover coincidences.

You can just look at the background rate of a symptom or condition, and compare the periods before and after you start using a vaccine.

For instance, consider this study from Australia about using the HPV vaccine in boys, in which they made some predictions of what would happen after introducing the HPV vaccine.

Assuming an 80% vaccination rate with three doses per person — which equates to about 480 000 boys vaccinated and a total of 1 440 000 doses administered nationally per year in the first 2 years of the program — about 2.4 episodes of Guillain-Barré syndrome would be expected to occur within 6 weeks of vaccination. In addition, about 3.9 seizures and 6.5 acute allergy presentations would be expected to occur within 1 day of vaccination, including 0.3 episodes of anaphylaxis.

Clothier et al. on Human papillomavirus vaccine in boys: background rates of potential adverse events.

Wait. Are they saying that the HPV vaccine is going to cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, seizures, allergic reactions, and anaplylaxis?

Of course not. When the study was done, the kids hadn’t gotten any vaccines yet!

That was the background rate of those conditions.

They happened before the vaccine was given, and you can expect them to continue to happen after these kids start getting vaccinated – at that same rate.

What if they start happening more often after kids get vaccinated?

Then it makes it less likely to be a coincidence and more likely that the vaccine is actually causing an increase in the background rate. And vaccine safety studies look for that, which is how we know that vaccines don’t cause SIDS, transverse myelitis, multiple sclerosis, and many other conditions.

Most of you will have heard the maxim “correlation does not imply causation.” Just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other does not mean that one is responsible for the other. For instance, ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don’t light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagan-Dazs.

Nate Silver on The Signal and the Noise

Of course, when we are talking about coincidences, we are also talking about correlation and causation.

When correlation doesn’t equal causation, then it’s probably a coincidence. Or it’s at least caused by some other factor.

And coincidences happen all of the time.

Is It a Vaccine Injury or a Coincidence?

That something could be a coincidence is not typically want parents want to hear though, especially if their child has gotten sick.

What does it mean that something happens coincidentally?

“Most sudden cardiac deaths that remain unexplained after necropsy are probably caused by primary cardiac arrhythmias.”

Sudden death in children and adolescents

Often it just means that it is unexplained. And that it is chance alone that it occurred as the same time as something else.

“In the absence of a specific etiology for ASDs, and a tendency among parents of children with a disability to feel a strong sense of guilt, it is not surprising that parents attempt to form their own explanations for the disorder in order to cope with the diagnosis.”

Mercer et al on Parental perspectives on the causes of an autism spectrum disorder in their children

Again, when folks blame vaccines, it is often because they have nothing else to blame.

“In some fraction of the American population, however, the belief in a link remains. One reason is a coincidence of timing: children are routinely vaccinated just as parents begin to observe signs of autism. Most vaccines are administered during the first years of life, which is also a period of rapid developmental changes. Many developmental conditions, including autism, don’t become apparent until a child misses a milestone or loses an early skill, a change that in some cases can’t help but be coincident with a recent vaccination.”

Emily Willingham on The Autism-Vaccine Myth

Think that it is too big of a coincidence that some infants develop spasms shortly after their four month vaccines?

Dr. William James West first described these types of infantile spasms in the 1840s!

And the “Fifth Day Fits,” seizures that began when a newborn was five days old, was described in the 1970s, well before we began giving newborns the hepatitis B vaccine.

But SIDS was only discovered after we began vaccinating kids, right?

“But, with millions upon millions of doses given each year to infants in the first 6 months of life across industrialized countries and with sudden infant death syndrome being the most common cause of infant death among infants 1 month or older, the coincidence of SIDS following DTP vaccination just by chance will be relatively frequent. When the two events occur, with SIDS following vaccination, well-meaning and intelligent people will blame the vaccine. They seek order out of randomly occurring events.”

Jacobson et al. on A taxonomy of reasoning flaws in the anti-vaccine movement

Of course not.

Cases of SIDS have been described throughout recorded history and have been well studied to prove that they are not associated with vaccines.

“Some events after immunisation are clearly caused by the vaccine (for example, a sore arm at the injection site). However, others may happen by coincidence around the time of vaccination. It can therefore be difficult to separate those which are clearly caused by a vaccine and those that were going to happen anyway… Scientific method is then used to determine if these events are a coincidence or a result of the vaccine.

Vaccine side effects and adverse reactions

It is easy to blame a vaccine when something happens and a child was recently vaccinated. That is especially true now that anti-vaccine folks turn every story of a child’s death or disability into a vaccine injury story.

“Autism was known well before MMR vaccine became available.”

Chen et al. on Vaccine adverse events: causal or coincidental?

Blaming vaccines when it is clear that vaccines aren’t the cause doesn’t help anyone though. It scares other parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids. And it doesn’t help parents who need support caring for a sick child or help coping with the loss of a child.

What to Know About Vaccine Injuries vs Coincidences

While all possible adverse events after getting a vaccine should be reported to VAERS and your pediatrician, remember that just because something happened after getting vaccinated, it doesn’t mean that it was caused by the vaccine.

More on Vaccine Injuries vs Coincidences

Do Kids Really Get 72 Doses of Vaccines?

Most parents vaccinate their kids according to the recommended immunization schedule.

They know that’s the best way to keep them protected.

Do Kids Really Get 72 Doses of Vaccines?

Saying kids get 72 doses of vaccines is a propaganda too to scare parents.
Saying kids get 72 doses of vaccines is a propaganda tool to scare parents.

While kids do get more vaccines than their parents did, that’s only because we have more vaccines available to protect them from more now vaccine-preventable diseases.

Do they get their kids 72 doses of vaccines?

That sounds like a lot…

It sounds like a lot because it is an inflated number that is meant to scare parents.

Kids today do routinely get:

  • 13 vaccines, including 5 doses of DTaP, 4 doses of IPV (polio), 3 or 4 doses of hepatitis B, 3 or 4 doses of Hib (the number of doses depends on the vaccine brand used), 4 doses of Prevnar, 2 or 3 doses of rotavirus (the number of doses depends on the vaccine brand used), 2 doses of MMR, 2 doses of Varivax (chicken pox), 2 doses of hepatitis A, 1 doses of Tdap, 2 or 3 doses of HPV (the number of doses depends on the age you start the vaccine series), 2 doses of MCV4 (meningococcal vaccine), and yearly influenza vaccines
  • protection against 16 vaccine-preventable diseases, including diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chicken pox, pneumococcal disease, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, HPV, rotavirus, Hib, and flu
  • about 28 doses of those vaccines by age two years (with yearly flu shots)
  • about 35 doses of those vaccines by age five years (with yearly flu shots)
  • as few as 23 individual shots by age five years if your child is getting combination vaccines, like Pediarix or Pentacel and Kinrix or Quadracel and Proquad
  • about 54 doses of those vaccines by age 18 years, with a third of that coming from yearly flu vaccines

How do you get a number like 72?

You can boost your count to make it look scarier by counting the DTaP, MMR, and Tdap vaccines as three separate vaccines each, even though they aren’t available as individual vaccines anymore.

To boost the Vaccine Doses for Children a bit more, they add pregnancy doses too.
To boost the Vaccine Doses for Children a bit more, they add pregnancy doses too.

This trick of anti-vaccine math quickly turns these 8 shots into “24 doses.”

It’s not a coincidence.

Anti-vaccine folks want to scare you into thinking that vaccines are full of toxins, that kids get too many vaccines, that we give many more vaccines than other countries, and that this is causing our kids to get sick.

Can an unvaccinated child really get tetanus after a toe nail injury?
Can an unvaccinated child really get tetanus after a toe nail injury? Photo by Petrus Rudolf de Jong (CC BY 3.0)

None of it is true.

At age four years, when your preschooler routinely gets their DTaP, IPV, MMR, and chicken pox shots before starting kindergarten, how many vaccines or doses do you think they got? Two, because they got Kinrix or Quadracel (DTaP/IPV combo) and Proquad (MMR/chickenpox combo)? Four, because they got separate shots? Or Eight, because you think you should count each component of each vaccine separately?

Know that even if you do want to count them separately, it really just means that with those two or four shots, your child got protection against eight different vaccine-preventable diseases – diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox.

Vaccine-preventable diseases that have not disappeared, something that the “72 doses” sites don’t ever warn you about.

What to Know About Anti-Vaccine Math

Many websites use anti-vaccine math to inflate vaccine dose numbers and scare parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids.

More on Anti-Vaccine Math

How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Takes Advantage of Dead Children and Their Parents

It is bad enough that folks in the anti-vaccine movement use propaganda to scare parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids.

“The anti-vaccine argument is wrong in both the scientific and moral sense.”
Sarah Kurchak on Here’s How the Anti-Vaccination Movement Hurts Autistic People

Many people also think that the anti-vaccine message is anti-autism.

How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Takes Advantage of Dead Children and Their Parents

But just when you thought that they couldn’t go any lower, folks in the anti-vaccine movement find new ways to demonstrate their lacks of morals.

As a physician, I assure you this story isn’t believable at any level. In my opinion, the “health officials” are conjuring meningitis fairy tales about an “unvaccinated” boogeyman to cover for the much more probable cause of this child’s death: VACCINES.

The much more likely cause is right in front of us: “The child had just received his 4-month-old vaccinations two days beforehand.”

Jim Meehan

What is Dr. Jim Meehan talking about?

A four-month-old who recently died of bacterial meningitis in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

“Notice that THREE of the vaccines given at 4 months are for organisms capable of invading the brain and causing MENINGITIS. Rotavirus is a live virus vaccine capable of shedding from recently vaccinated children. The vaccine pre-clinical trials lacked placebo controls and were associated with infant deaths.

It doesn’t take my medical degree to understand how flimsy are the claims in this story.”

Jim Meehan

While rotavirus is a live virus vaccine, rotavirus rarely causes central nervous system disease. And he died of bacterial meningitis. It shouldn’t take a medical degree to know that rotavirus is a virus, not a bacteria.

While two of the other vaccines routinely given at four months do actually protect you from meningitis, both Prevnar and Hib are sub-unit vaccines, so can’t actually cause disease. Unfortunately, at four months, he would have been only partially protected against Prevnar and Hib, having only received two of four dosages of those vaccines.

“They expect the general public to be ignorant of the fact that we can actually measure the presence of the meningitis causing organisms for which there are vaccines: Haemophilus influenzae, Pneumococcus, and Meningococcus. So, where are the tests that confirm the presence of one of these “vaccine preventable” organisms?! Where’s the spinal tap/CSF pathology report?

As hard as it is for a grieving family to conceive of an autopsy, I pray the family demands a confirmation of the farcical cause of death being contrived in this case.”

Jim Meehan

Has Jim Meehan heard of HIPAA?

Does he read any of the other messages when he is writing his own comments about this family?

Why should this family have to come out and give an explanation for how their child died?
Why should this family have to come out and give an explanation for how their child died?

Is Jim Meehan really a doctor? It shouldn’t take a medical degree to understand that carriers of a disease don’t usually have symptoms of the disease.

“Again, from the article: “Health care officials told Dempsey they BELIEVE an unvaccinated person was carrying meningitis and Killy happened to come into contact with that person.”

They “believe”…give me a break. It should have said, “they made-up a story to cover for the real cause.”

SECOND, people don’t walk around with meningitis. They lay in their beds in a dark room and writhe in pain.

THIRD, the likelihood that an unvaccinated individual was walking around with meningitis is vanishingly small. To even list that in the top 100 options of a differential diagnosis is pure fiction.

FOURTH, where is this hypothetical unvaccinated meningitis shedding “patient zero?” He or she would have been so obviously sick that there is no way new parents would not remember the likely suspect…unless the suspect never existed.”

Jim Meehan

In this case, with a meningococcal infection, which is what the infant is thought to have, about 10% of people are carriers, asymptomatically having the Neisseria meningitidis bacteria in their nose or throat.

In the United States, we have two types of meningococcal vaccines, neither of which is routinely given to infants:

  • Menactra and Menveo – meningococcal conjugate vaccines that protect against serogroups A, C, W, Y and first given when kids are 11 to 12 years old, with a booster at age 16 years.
  • Bexsero and Trumenba – meningococcal conjugate vaccines that only  protect against serogroup B and can be given to kids at increased risk and teens and young adults who want to reduce their risk of getting MenB disease

The only other possibility, since they mentioned that exposed people received antibiotics, would be the Hib bacteria.

“In the prevaccine era, Hib could be isolated from the nasopharynx of 0.5%–3% of normal infants and children but was not common in adults.”

CDC on the Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases

Again, these carriers can be contagious, even though they don’t have any symptoms.

“It’s likely that these “health officials” are covering for the pharmaceutical/vaccine industry that pays them so well. It’s “health officials” like this that for decades have pretended that sudden unexplained infant death syndrome (SUIDS), not only has no explanation, but it couldn’t possibly be related to the injection of neurotoxic doses of aluminum into the bodies of tiny baby humans. They can ignore the clustering of infant deaths that occurs around the same times that CDC recommends multiple (5-13) vaccines at one visit, but I won’t.”

Jim Meehan

Why is a family that just lost their child getting harassed by anti-vaccine folks?

This is the modern anti-vaccine movement.
This is the modern anti-vaccine movement.

One clue is that Jim Meehan is pushing the idea that there is a Big Pharma conspiracy behind this child’s death.

An anti-vaccine parenting group helping spread misinformation about this baby's death.
An anti-vaccine parenting group helping spread misinformation about this baby’s death.

And there are many anti-vaccine parenting groups that are helping spread his message around.

Of course, this isn’t the first time this has happened.

Anti-vaccine folks routinely hound parents who die of SIDS and shaken baby syndrome, working to convince them that vaccines caused their deaths.

Even infants who die of vitamin K deficiency bleeding because they skipped their baby’s vitamin K shot all of a sudden have a vaccine injury.

They turn every story of a child’s death or disability into a vaccine injury story.

Shame on them all.

More on the Vultures of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

A Shot at the Dark – DPT vs DTaP

Everyone knows that the DPT vaccine caused a lot of vaccine injuries, right?

“I got interested in the topic of vaccines way back in medical school. A friend of mine convinced me to read a book about vaccines, and it ended up being a very anti-vaccine book. It was all about an old vaccine called the DTP vaccine that we don’t use anymore. But the book talked a lot about the risks and the dangers of that vaccine. The author of that book was calling for that vaccine to no longer be used.

A number of years later, it turns out that they did discover that vaccine was causing a lot of very severe, life-threatening, even fatal side effects, so they did end up taking that vaccine off the market.

So it kind of opened my eyes to the fact that there are some very severe, fortunately very rare, side effects to vaccines, and I wanted to learn more about this issue. I started reading a lot more books.”

Bob Sears, MD on The Vaccine War

After all, it was after reports of those vaccine injuries, including seizures and encephalitis, that led to:

  • lawsuits and many pharmaceutical companies to stop making vaccines
  • the DPT: Vaccine Roulette special airing on TV
  • Barbara Loe Fisher, believing that her child was damaged by the DPT vaccine, forming the Dissatisfied Parents Together organization (she later changed the name to the National Vaccine Information Center), and writing the book DPT: A Shot in the Dark (this is the anti-vaccine book that Bob Sears is talking about above)
  • the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act passing in 1986, creating the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the Vaccine Court
  • the DTaP vaccine replacing the DTP vaccine

But were those reports true?

And did they ever really discover that the DPT “vaccine was causing a lot of very severe, life-threatening, even fatal side effects,” which led to them “taking that vaccine off the market” as Dr. Bob said?

A Shot at the Dark

It is easy to think that they were true, as we don’t use the DTP vaccine anymore.

But was it ever “taken off the market?”

“During the period of transition from use of whole-cell DTP to DTaP, whole-cell DTP is an acceptable alternative to DTaP for any of the five doses. For the first four doses, whole-cell DTP combined with Hib vaccine (DTP-Hib vaccine) is an acceptable alternative to DTaP and Hib vaccine administered at separate sites.”

ACIP on Pertussis Vaccination: Use of Acellular Pertussis Vaccines Among Infants and Young Children Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

No, it was replaced by a newer vaccine – DTaP.

And actually, it is still used in some parts of the world.

The whole-cell DTP vaccine did cause more side effects than the newer DTaP vaccine, but we are talking about relatively mild side effects, like local reactions, pain, and fever. And while that it is good, it comes at a cost, a less effective vaccine.

What about epilepsy and encephalitis?

After all of the scare about the DPT vaccine, studies quickly showed that it didn't cause all of the bad side effects that folks say it did.
After all of the scare about the DPT vaccine, studies quickly showed that it didn’t cause all of the bad side effects that folks say it did.

One clue that the DTP vaccine didn’t cause many of the problems that were blamed on it, is that the same vaccine lawsuits that were succeeding in driving vaccine manufacturers out of business in the United States, were failing in the UK.

“Where given effects, such as serious neurological disease or permanent brain damage, occur with or without pertussis vaccination, it is only possible to assess whether the vaccine is a cause, or more precisely a risk factor, when the background incidence of the disease is taken into account. The question therefore is, does the effect occur more often after pertussis vaccination than could be expected by chance?”

Justice Jeremy Stuart-Smith

There is also the fact that many children who were originally thought to have been vaccine injured after their DPT vaccine are now known to have Dravet syndrome.

Without a diagnosis, Cossolotto said, she would probably still believe — erroneously — that the DPT shot caused Michaela’s illness. “I understand this is a genetic condition,” she said. “Having an answer does make a difference.”

Medical mystery: Seizures strike baby after routine vaccine

And then there are the reports and studies that found:

  • no association with brain injury, epilepsy, SIDS, or infantile spasms
  • no increased risk for serious neurological illness in the week after getting vaccinated with DPT
  • no increased risk for encephalopathy in the 90 days after receiving DTP and MMR vaccines
  • no difference in severe reactions after DPT vs DTaP, including encephalopathy, seizures, and allergic reactions

So no, the DPT vaccine was never really as dangerous as folks said or thought it was, despite what you might read or hear in anti-vaccine books or news reports.

What to Know About the Safety of the DPT Vaccine

Misconceptions about the risks and safety of the DPT vaccine created the modern anti-vaccine movement and unfortunately, continues to influence many people.

More on the Safety of the DPT Vaccine

 

Has the United States’ Infant Mortality Rate Ranking Been Dropping as We Vaccinate More Kids?

Of all of the myths about vaccines that confuse and scare some parents, those about infant mortality rates can be especially hard to easily put aside.

After all, why doesn’t the United States rank better for infant mortality rates since most parents do vaccinate and protect their kids?

Vaccines and Infant Mortality Rates

That’s actually fairly easy to answer.

“Globally, the infant mortality rate has decreased from an estimated rate of 64.8 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to 30.5 deaths per 1000 live births in 2016.”

WHO on Infant Mortality Situation and Trends

Vaccine-preventable diseases don’t have much effect on infant mortality rates in the United States these days.

What does?

  • birth defects
  • premature births
  • SIDS
  • maternal complications of pregnancy
  • injuries

Think about it… If vaccines did increase infant mortality rates, then why would infant mortality rates be dropping as we vaccinate more kids?

Has the United States’ Infant Mortality Rate Ranking Been Dropping as We Vaccinate More Kids?

The Wisconsin Coalition for Informed Vaccination is pushing myths about SIDS and vaccines.
The Wisconsin Coalition for Informed Vaccination is pushing myths about infant mortality rates and vaccines.

Do you know what has been dropping?

The infant mortality rate.

In fact, infant mortality rates continue to drop and are now at their lowest levels ever.

While it is good news that the rate is dropping, most folks think they can be better.

For one thing, some states, like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia, etc., have much higher infant mortality rates than others. Why? Much of those differences, can be explained by socio-economic factors. That’s also though to explain much of the differences in infant mortality rates between the U.S. and other developed countries, most of which have universal health care.

New Jersey, although they have ranked high for autism rates, has lower than average rates of infant mortality.
New Jersey, although they have ranked high for autism rates, has lower than average rates of infant mortality.

Another big difference is that many countries count infant mortality rates using different criteria than the United States.

For example, it is estimated that at least 40% of the differences between infant mortality rates in the United States and other countries is due to those countries not counting extremely preterm births among their statistics.

But why has the United States’ infant mortality ranking fallen relative to other developed nations?

Most European Countries had much higher infant mortality rates than the US in the 1960s and 70s, which affected relative rankings, even as all countries saw infant mortality rates fall.
OECD data shows that most European Countries have historically had much higher infant mortality rates than the US, which have affected relative rankings, even as all countries have seen infant mortality rates fall.

Although anti-vaccine groups try to tie this to ‘routine vaccination,’ it is easy to see that other countries have historically had much higher infant mortality rates than the United States. As they have caught up, the United States’ ranking has dropped relative to theirs, even though all have seen infant mortality rates drop.

Infant Mortality Rates in the Pre-Vaccine Era

But if you really want to understand the relationship of vaccines to infant mortality rates, you just have to look back to the pre-vaccine era. Back then, now vaccine-preventable diseases did have a big effect on infant mortality rates in the United States and elsewhere.

In 1910, for example, the most common causes of death for infants under 1 year were:

  1. diarrhea and enteritis
  2. premature birth
  3. congenital debility
  4. bronchopneumonia
  5. pneumonia
  6. malformations
  7. bronchitis
  8. convulsions
  9. injuries at birth
  10. whooping cough
  11. tuberculosis
  12. meningitis
  13. measles
  14. accident
  15. diphtheria

Although advances in modern medicine would help decrease the mortality from many of those diseases, it was vaccines that truly worked to make sure they were no longer a big part of our infant mortality statistics.

How will we continue to decrease our infant mortality rates?

Most experts think that it will require better access to health care for all members of society.

What to Know About Infant Mortality Rate Rankings

Infant mortality rates are not linked to vaccines.

More Infant Mortality Rate Rankings