“My name is Donna Gary. I am a constituent of Senator Kennedy’s from Massachusetts. Our family should have celebrated our very first granddaughter’s first birthday last month. Instead, we will commemorate the anniversary of her death at the end of this month.

Our granddaughter, Lee Ann, was just 8 weeks old when her mother took her to the doctor for her routine checkup. That included, of course, her first DPT inoculation and oral polio vaccine. In all her entire 8 weeks of life this lovable, extremely alert baby had never produced such a blood-curdling scream as she did at the moment the shot was given. Neither had her mother ever before seen her back arch as it did while she screamed. She was inconsolable. Even her daddy could not understand Lee Ann’s uncharacteristic screaming and crying.

Four hours later, Lee Ann was dead. “Crib death,” the doctor said — “SIDS.”

“Could it be connected to the shot?” her parents implored.

“No.”

“But she just had her first DPT shot this afternoon. Could there possibly be any connection to it?”

“No, no connection at all,” the emergency room doctor said definitely.

My husband and I hurried to the hospital the following morning after Lee Ann’s death to talk with the pathologist before the autopsy. We wanted to make sure he was alerted to her DPT inoculation such a short time before her death — just in case there was something else he could look for to make the connection. He was unavailable to talk with us. We waited two-and-a-half hours. Finally, we got to talk to another doctor after the autopsy had been completed. He said it was SIDS.

In the months before Lee Ann was born, I regularly checked with a friend as to the state of her grandchild’s condition. He is nearly a year-and-a-half older than Lee Ann. On his first DPT shot he passed out cold for 15 minutes, right in the pediatrician’s office.

“Normal reaction for some children,” the pediatrician reassured. The parents were scared, but they knew what a fine doctor they had. They trusted his judgment. When it was time for the second shot, they asked “Are you sure it’s alright? Is it really necessary?” Their pediatrician again reassured them. He told them how awful it was to experience, as he had, one of his infant patient’s bout with whooping cough. That baby had died. They gave him his second DPT shot that day. He became brain-damaged.

This past week I had an opportunity to read through printed copies of the hearings of this committee. I am dismayed to learn that this same talk has been going on for years, and nothing has seemed to progress to incorporate what seems so obvious and necessary to keep from destroying any more babies, and to compensate financially those who have already been damaged for life. How accurate are our statistics on adverse reactions to vaccines when parents have been told, are still being told, “No connection to the shot, no connection at all.”?

What about the mother I have recently talked with who has a 4-year-old brain-damaged son? On all three of his DPT shots he had a convulsion in the presence of the pediatrician. “No connection,” the pediatrician assured.

I talked with a father in a town adjoining ours whose son died at the age of 9 weeks, several months before our own granddaughter’s death. It was the day after his DPT inoculation. “SIDS” is the statement on the death certificate.

Are the statistics that the medical world loves to quote to say, “There is no connection,” really accurate, or are they based on poor diagnoses, poor record keeping? What is being done to provide a safer vaccine? Who is overseeing? Will it be the same scientists and doctors who have been overseeing in the past? How much longer does the public have to wait? How are physicians and clinics going to be held accountable to see that parents are informed of the possible reactions? And how are those children who should not receive the vaccine to be identified before they are damaged — or dead?”  READ ARTICLE BY NEIL MILLER…

VLA Comment:  This is a most excellent article with source notes.  Neil Miller has had his work published in peer reviewed journals, such as Vaccine.  Miller shows how Coroners arrive at “cause of death by choosing from an establishment “code” list.  “a closer inspection of the ICD — the 130 official ways for an infant to die — revealed a loophole. Medical certifiers, such as coroners, could choose from among several categories of death when a baby suddenly expired. They didn’t have to list the death as SIDS. Although the post-neonatal SIDS rate dropped by an average annual rate of 8.6% from 1992 through 2001 following the AAP’s seemingly successful “Back to Sleep” campaign, the post-neonatal mortality rate from “suffocation in bed” (ICD-9 code E913.0) increased during this same period at an average annual rate of 11.2%. Sudden, unexplained infant deaths that were classified as SIDS prior to the “Back to Sleep” campaign, were now being classified as deaths due to suffocation in bed!”