Iowa legislators are considering a bill that would require medical examiners to document recent immunizations on the death certificates of children who died from unknown causes, KIMT3 News reported.
Bill sponsor Rep. Samantha Fett of Warren County said this information is important to understand what might be behind deaths categorized as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
“The U.S. continues to have a high SIDS rate compared to every other industrialized nation,” Fett told The Defender. “I believe it is time to start gathering this information for the parents of the children who have died.”
Fett said health departments also should have this information so health officials and medical examiners can ensure that every medication a child takes is taken into consideration when trying to determine why a child died.
Medical researcher Neil Z. Miller, author of numerous books on vaccine safety, told The Defender that “of course” the bill is a good idea.
“A child never dies from ‘unknown causes,’” Miller said. “There is always a reason for death. Often, that reason is vaccines. But medical examiners may be ‘hesitant’ to list vaccines as the probable cause due to intense pressure from medical colleagues.”
The proposed bill would relieve that pressure.
Critics of the bill say the medical review conducted when a child dies is already extensive. A local physician, Dr. Austin Baeth of Polk County, Iowa, said that even considering the bill “gives the signal to Iowans out there that vaccines are dangerous.”
Miller disagreed. “No, the actual harm may be yet another child’s death labeled as being from unknown causes, which can serve as a euphemism for a vaccine-related death.”
A Wright County medical examiner told KIMT3 that there are approximately 30 child deaths per year in Iowa that are attributed to unknown circumstances.
“That is in Iowa alone, a state with a relatively small population,” Miller said. “Conservatively, that would translate to a minimum of 1,500 such deaths nationwide.”
The Republican bill was introduced on Jan. 15. On Monday, a subcommittee advanced the bill to the House Health and Human Services Committee for consideration.
Similar bills have been introduced in Florida, Minnesota and Mississippi. Sen. Paul Rosino of Oklahoma is slated next week to introduce similar legislation in his state.
SIDS linked to vaccines
Fett said that recent studies comparing health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children put the issue of vaccines and SIDS on her radar.
She also cited a recent analysis of data from the Louisiana Department of Health showing that infants vaccinated in their second month of life were more likely to die in their third month than their unvaccinated counterparts. That study was conducted by scientists from Children’s Health Defense.
A SIDS diagnosis is given when an infant under age 1 dies suddenly, typically during sleep, and an investigation into the death fails to yield a cause. However, 95% of SIDS deaths occur in the first six months of life, peaking at ages 2-4 months.
Each year, the U.S. records more than five infant deaths per 1,000 live births, far exceeding the rates in other high-income countries.
However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) monitoring of the sudden deaths of infants and young people is not comprehensive. A recent study published in JAMA Network Open found that the CDC underestimates the rate of sudden unexplained deaths in childhood and that certification of sudden unexplained pediatric deaths is inconsistent.
After birth defects and prematurity, SIDS is the third leading cause of death among infants. Yet the medical industry claims to remain puzzled about the cause.
The SIDS diagnosis didn’t exist until the late 1960s, when the category was created in response to a rise in sudden unexplained infant deaths.
In the early 1960s, the number of vaccines administered to most U.S. infants increased.
The federal government began appropriating money so the CDC could work with local health departments to vaccinate all children. In 1972, the agency designated the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) as a federal advisory committee. ACIP makes the recommendations for vaccines to be listed on the childhood immunization schedule.
As SIDS rates rose, so did parental concern that SIDS was connected to vaccination. However, health officials assured parents that unexplained death following vaccination was “merely coincidental,” according to Miller’s research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Toxicology Reports.
He also said that before 1979, the ICD included cause-of-death classifications associated with “prophylactic vaccination” as an official cause of death. However, in 1979, the ICD was revised and that category was eliminated. As a result, “medical examiners are compelled to misclassify and conceal vaccine-related fatalities under alternate cause-of-death classifications.”
Instead of examining the link between vaccines and SIDS, public health researchers developed a “triple-risk model” for explaining SIDS.
According to that model, SIDS occurs when a baby has an unknown medical condition, is going through an important period of development where the body changes quickly, and it encounters an outside stressor, such as sleeping on its stomach.
Because this model offers the prevailing theory on causes of infant death, it’s not uncommon for law enforcement to blame parents for the death of babies who die following vaccination.
Police are not educated about possible links between vaccination and SIDS, and information about vaccination is typically not included in coroner’s reports — a gap Iowa’s proposed legislation seeks to correct.
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