We're always told that vaccines were a medical marvel that safely ended the dark age of infectious disease. However, when the actual records are examined, they often abjectly failed to prevent those diseases, and worse still, frequently caused outbreaks and severely injured many of the recipients.

This in part resulted from the inherent toxicity of vaccines and in part because manufacturing challenges regularly resulted in hot lots being released. Rather than address this, the vaccine industry chose to create a variety of strategies to conceal those issues, such as enshrining the dogma "all vaccines are safe" and giving blanket legal immunity to all the "safe" vaccines.

The Toxicity Bell Curve

When humans are exposed to toxins, the reactions to them are distributed such that severe injuries are much rarer. As a result, many of the more subtle, common reactions typically go unrecognized.

Because of this, if a product causes a significant number of deaths (e.g., the COVID mRNA vaccines), that's often the tip of the iceberg and far larger number of injuries lie under the surface (e.g., polling showed that showed 34% of those vaccinated for COVID reported minor side effects and 7% reported significant side effects).

Sudden Infant Deaths

This sadly also holds true for infant deaths, and since its creation, the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DPT) vaccine has been associated with those deaths. For example, in 2014, unmarked mass graves belonging to Irish orphans were discovered which belonged to a group of 2,051 children upon whom an early diphtheria vaccine was covertly tested in the 1930s.¹

Note: Early vaccine experiments² (including DPT) were conducted in the 1960s to 1970s at Irish care homes, and the test subjects included babies and handicapped children.

Likewise, as detailed by Sir Graham Wilson,³ in the early 1900s, there were over a dozen cases in the medical literature (and likely far more that weren't documented) where groups of children received an incorrectly prepared diphtheria vaccine, and collectively, thousands became severely ill, with hundreds suffering an agonizing death.

A wave of deaths hence followed DPT's adoption, which like those following the COVID vaccines, became a "mysterious syndrome," initially being called "crib death" and then "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome" (SIDS). In turn, a few doctors saw this and spoke out against it.

Many of these doctors' experiences (especially for Kalokerinos) were summarized in a talk by Raymond Obomsawin:

Note: Obomsawin also highlighted that when Japan moved the DPT injections from 3 to 5 months to 24 months of age, there was an 85% to 90% reduction in DPT brain damage and SIDS cases, and a 60% decrease in the overall infant mortality rate.

A Shot in the Dark

In addition to causing death, the DPT vaccine frequently caused brain injuries. As the media had not yet been bought out by the pharmaceutical industry (due to a 1997 FTC decision legalizing pharmaceutical television advertisements), programs critical of vaccination would occasionally air such as a 1982 one highlighting the profound disability being caused by the DPT vaccine.

Many parents with DPT injured children saw this program, called NBC and then were connected by NBC, forming "Dissatisfied Parents Together" one of the original vaccine safety groups, and in 1985, "DPT, A Shot in the Dark," was published.¹¹ DPT, A Shot in the Dark highlighted that:¹²

Additionally, another cluster of SIDS deaths in Fresno California led to the local newspaper conducting an investigation that revealed widespread issues with hot DPT lots, had doctors in the area providence evidence DPT was indeed causing SIDS, and disclosed that a 1978 study on the safety of the DPT vaccine was buried after researchers discovered adverse reactions within 48 hours of immunization were 5000% higher than expected.

This damning indictment of the DPT vaccine led to national vaccine safety legislation being passed in 1986²⁴ (which sadly subsequently got co-opted and became nothing but a blanket liability shield for industry) and the whole cell DTwP vaccine eventually being replaced with the safer acellular DTaP vaccine.

Note: Since the DTaP vaccine costs more to produce, industry long resisted it and still gives DTwP to poorer regions like Africa.²⁵

Whole Cell Pertussis in Africa

Peter Aaby, a renowned vaccine scientist and promoter of vaccination, was commissioned by the WHO to study the effects of vaccines commonly utilized in charitable programs by the international community on infant mortality (studies which for context are almost never conducted). To his horror, Aaby discovered:²⁶

"DPT was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated [DTwP increased deaths 3.93 times in boys and 9.98 times in girls]. No prospective study has shown beneficial survival effects of DPT. Unfortunately, DPT is the most widely used vaccine, and the proportion of people who receive DPT is used globally as an indicator of a country's vaccination program performance.

It should be of concern that the effect of routine vaccinations on all-cause mortality was not tested in randomized trials. All currently available evidence suggests that the DPT vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Although a vaccine protects children against the target disease, it may also increase their susceptibility to unrelated infections."

Aaby's 2017 results were, not surprisingly, buried, and due to Bill Gate's "donations" vaccination (including with DTwP) has become a greater and greater focus of the WHO. However, in 2019 Peter Gøtzsche, M.D., a renowned expert on research fraud (who has been a critical reformer in evidence-based medicine), then conducted a systematic review of the DPT program²⁷ which concluded:

"Evidence tells us that it is likely that the DPT vaccine increases total mortality in low-income countries."

Note: Aaby found the primary cause of these deaths was DPT inducing immune suppression and other infections later killing the infants (something which has also been observed with many other vaccines).

Dose-Response Relationships

A key metric for establishing causality is demonstrating a dose-response relationship (e.g., more vaccines causing more deaths).

On a national level, this has been shown by SIDS rates going up as the number of vaccines increased. Likewise, a 2011 study²⁸ of the 34 nations with the lowest infant mortality rate (America being No. 34) showed an unmistakable relationship between total vaccinations and SIDS.

Giving multiple vaccinations simultaneously (e.g., hexavalent vaccines²⁹ containing DTP + Polio + Haemophilus Influenza B + Hepatitis B) has also been repeatedly shown to increase the risk of SIDS. For example:

Similarly, since all infants receive the same vaccine dose, premature infants (being smaller) effectively receive a higher dose. In turn, that analysis³⁷ also found the youngest infants were the most likely to die following vaccination.

Respiratory Arrest

Infants can experience a cardiorespiratory event, such as an interruption of breathing or a significant slowing of the heart rate, following vaccination. In many cases, these events require CPR, and had the infant not been monitored at the hospital when it occurred, the infant would have likely died. This has been proven by decades of hospital studies of premature infants that all showed:

Note: I summarized 13 studies on vaccines stopping breathing here, including a 2025 trial.^{38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50}

Remarkably, despite this complication of vaccination being recognized by the medical field, it has never been connected to SIDS and still is viewed as inconsequential relative to "immense benefits of vaccination."⁵¹

As such, an Australian group developed a way to monitor infants at home continuously⁵² and, like many others, was able to demonstrate non-fatal disruptions of breathing spiked following DPT and Polio vaccination (this is the most likely cause of SIDS) and that this disruption continued for over six weeks post-vaccination⁵³ (hence overlapping with the typical period of death that has been observed to follow vaccination). Most importantly, the breathing often had not fully recovered by the time the next vaccine was given.^54,55

Note: Some package inserts⁵⁶ for DTaP vaccines list SIDS as a possible side effect.

What Causes SIDS?

When SIDS autopsies are conducted (detailed here), they typically find unusual changes such as acute congestion, edema, and small hemorrhages in the brainstem and internal organs along with brain tissue infiltration by different immune cells.^57,58,59,60

Note: These findings mirror what Kalokerinos observed in the many autopsies he conducted⁶¹ (and attributed to bacterial LPS endotoxins). Likewise, a government pertussis specialist shared with me that some of these effects (e.g., vascular leakage) are also seen with pertussis toxin toxicity (which suggests the vaccine pertussis toxin may not be fully inactivated — something which was frequently an issue with previous lethal diphtheria hot lots⁶²).

One of the greatest dangers with vaccines is that they cause blood cells to clump together, creating microstrokes in smaller blood vessels.⁶³ Certain parts of the brain are more vulnerable to this, and as such, specific cranial nerves (e.g., 6 and 7) will frequently display observable deficits after vaccination (e.g., the eyes turning inwards).

Since a key area of the brain for ensuring automatic breathing is very close to the nuclei for the commonly affected cranial nerves, breathing is likely affected by those microstrokes as well.

In turn, I suspect that the partial interruptions of respiration occur when there is a partial interruption of one side's blood supply, whereas the full respiratory arrest occurs when both sides are affected. Similarly, the neurologist who discovered vaccination caused pathologic microstrokes also came across cases where a cranial nerve 6 deficit on both sides (implying both sides of the brainstem had a partial loss of blood flow) directly preceded SIDS.

Note: Kalokerinos also believed the loss of automatic breathing came from LPS attacking the brainstem's respiratory center and that vitamin C rapidly neutralized it, whereas I believe the hemorrhages, coagulation, swelling he saw were in part due to zeta potential changes and that the rapid improvements he saw following vitamin C were due to it restoring the physiologic zeta potential.

The Evolution of SIDS

The Back to Sleep campaign (founded on the idea SIDS was caused by sleeping facedown and the infant then suffocating) is often heralded as one of the greatest successes in medical history since SIDS rates declined after it began — hence leading to that success being used to debunk the link between SIDS and vaccination.

However, if you look at the actual data, a strong case can be made that drop was due to the TDwP to TDaP switch and then the reclassification of SIDS cases:

Note: Somewhat analogously, the decline in Polio was likely due to nerve damaging pesticides being phased out when the vaccine was introduced, and most cases of paralysis being reclassified as no longer being polio.

Since that time, the total infant death rate remained relatively unchanged, until in 2020 something extraordinary happened — the lockdowns led to America's first significant drop in vaccination as well-child (vaccination) visits were "non-essential." At the time, many in the vaccine safety community predicted this would lead to an unprecedented drop in SIDS rates. Vaccination rates indeed dropped, and in tandem, deaths did as well:⁶⁴

But only in children at the ages SIDS typically affects:

Furthermore, due to the political climate in Florida in 2021,⁶⁵ the state's childhood vaccination rate decreased from 93.4% in 2020 to 79.3% in 2021. At the same time, all-cause infant mortality under one year of age in Florida also reduced by 8.93% (a reversal of the 2020 trend, where infant mortality had increased by 0.67%).

A 14% decrease in vaccination coverage was associated with a 9% decrease in infant mortality, suggesting roughly half of the infant deaths in Florida could be attributed to vaccinations.

Note: Earlier this week, Idaho twins were found dead in bed, a highly unusual event prompting a homicide investigation.⁶⁶ From speaking to doctors directly connected to the case, I learned that the infants were three months premature, and after receiving five vaccines concurrently, became cyanotic, were told they had a vaccine reaction and give Tylenol. The infants completely changed and eight days later had terrible diarrhea and an unusual bile discharge, then died later that night in bed.

Those who knew the family did not suspect a homicide and likewise, a colleague who reviewed the autopsy shared there was no evidence of foul play. Had the common risk factors for vaccine caused SIDS been known, this tragedy likely would have been avoided.⁶⁷

Conclusion

"Something can be very obvious. I mean, what could be more obvious than the dead kid? It can be extremely serious and its existence not only be ignored, but denied, and unless this is understood, it is impossible to understand what my problem was. Now, I knew that these other places were having infant deaths too. Yet when I spoke to doctors, their response was almost universally hostile. So I was left to handle the problem by myself."

~ Archie Kalokerinos

One of the saddest things about vaccine injuries is that children lack the ability to communicate how vaccines have injured them or refuse further immunizations. In turn, one of the most heartbreaking things I've had to witness in medicine are children, in whatever way they can, trying to tell their parents or doctors and nurses that vaccines are hurting them, but are ignored and have something catastrophic happen after they are injected without their consent.

However, now that so many adults (who can communicate) have been injured by the COVID vaccines, the veil has been removed, and an awareness is forming around the potential consequences of vaccination. Secretary Kennedy is now at last beginning the long overdue evaluation of the safety of the vaccines given to our children, and it is imperative we do all that we can to support this investigation being allowed to proceed forward.

Author's Note: This is an abbreviated version of a full-length article that takes a deeper look into the evidence linking SIDS to vaccination, which can be read here. Additionally, a companion article on exactly how vaccines cause microstrokes and neurological injuries can be read here along with a companion article which details all the evidence linking specific chronic illnesses and how to recognize the subtle effects of vaccination (which can be read here).

A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD's exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also respect AMD's desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD's work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.