The Coincidence Gambit

RFK Jr.’s organization recently released a series of terrifying videos on Twitter(X) claiming that vaccines are suddenly killing children.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization, has found yet another way to scare parents about vaccines. In a series of heartbreaking posts on Twitter (X), parents tell stories of children lost forever to vaccine injury. Our children were fine, they lament, but moments to days to weeks after getting vaccinated, they were dead. Doctors are portrayed as unknowing, public health officials as uncaring, and pharmaceutical companies as evil.  

Most of the stories are about young infants. For example:

• “Corbyn got his flu shot at 9:30 in the morning, and he was dead between 9 and 11 pm that evening. Corbyn's mother said that when she was laying him on the table to be vaccinated, something inside her screamed ‘NO. Don't Do It!’” But it was too late.

• “A few days after his routine vaccinations, Kari had gone upstairs to kiss her son Mason goodnight when she felt that his cheek was extremely cold. ‘I knew that he was dead. I just started screaming he's dead, he's dead.’ According to Kari, the doctor said, ‘If you don't give him these vaccines ...you're signing his death certificate.’ [But after Mason’s death], ‘the doctors screaming 'safe and effective' were NOWHERE to be found.’"

• “Georgie Fisher received the MMR vaccine, and ten days later, he tragically died. Georgie's photograph is now placed in memoriam at the front of the #CHDBus, where CHD will be collecting similar vaccine injury stories from across the country.”

Why were these children dying? The most likely explanation can be found in an article in the Guardian which revealed that, according to the coroner, Georgie Fisher had died from sudden infant death syndrome, which affects between 3,000 and 4,500 babies in the United States every year. Risk factors include sleeping on the stomach rather than back, overheating while sleeping, sleeping on surfaces that are too soft, smoking during pregnancy, prematurity, and a sibling who died of SIDS. Vaccination is not a risk factor.

Given that SIDS kills about 4,000 babies every year—and that about 90 percent of babies in the United States are vaccinated during infancy—some children who die from SIDS will have recently been vaccinated. The inability of Children’s Health Defense to distinguish coincidence from causality can be found in a story told by a professor at Duke University School of Medicine. The professor’s friend took his 4-month-old child to a clinic to get a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine. The father waited and waited in line, eventually giving up and taking the baby home without getting vaccinated. Several hours later, he found his child dead in the crib, a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. Had the child been vaccinated, the father could easily have been convinced that the vaccine was the cause. And the child’s story might have been posted on Twitter (X) and his name inscribed on the CHD bus.

A better way for Children’s Health Defense to defend children’s health would be to post stories about an unvaccinated four-month-old girl who died from Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) in her mother’s arms, or an unvaccinated six-year-old boy who developed tetanus  and was on a ventilator for 44 days, or an unvaccinated 15-year-old girl who died from Covid-19, the father starting a GoFundMe campaign to pay for her funeral, or an unvaccinated 12-year-old girl with influenza who was hospitalized for three months on ECMO (life support). All avoidable by vaccination.

Vaccines are designed to prevent vaccine-preventable diseases, not everything else that occurs in life. Children’s Health Defense, were they truly interested in defending the health of children, would do well to explain this difference. Otherwise, their Twitter (X) testimonials, by scaring parents unnecessarily, will only cause more parents to put children in harm’s way.