This mistake was not made again. Gerald M. Fenichel, MD, chairman of the Department of Neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in 1983 published an article on vaccinations entitled “the danger of case reports,” and the pro-vaccination literature produced in profusion in later years and decades has generally steered away from and around any such thing as a "case report." These researchers will examine with minute precision hospital card files, medicare cover sheets, even physicians’ records, but God preserve us from contact with the children themselves or their families!

Another sign of the hardening official position was a two-part article by Daniel Shannon, M.D., in a 1982 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Shannon was Director of the Pediatric Pulmonary Unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a “principal investigator” of SIDS. His article on the causes of SIDS (financed by the U.S. Public Health Service) never mentioned vaccination even though, at a 1979 FDA meeting on "The Relation between DPT Vaccines and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome," Shannon had described 200 infants with severe breathing difficulties after a DPT shot, such that they required resuscitation. In 1979 he had said: “We do have all this data. It is all recorded on tabular sheets, and we have it on nearly 200 infants that we have evaluated this way. It is in a capacity that it can be pulled, but in 1982 he preferred not to pull this information after all.

When Barbara Fisher and I queried him on this in a 1982 letter, he replied: "I did not mention DPT shots in my review article on SIDS in the New England Journal of Medicine because there are no data collected in a scientific way [no anecdotal data, if you please!] that support an association. This includes Dr. Torch’s report."

So the cat was let out of the bag by Dr. Torch, who has been effectively silenced by his colleagues since that memorable date. In his editorial attacking “case reports” as a basis for evaluating vaccine damage, Gerald Fenichel alluded to an ongoing study by the NIH on “risk factors” in sudden infant death syndrome which, Fenichel asserted, "excluded DPT as a causal factor in sudden infant death syndrome."

Let us take a look at this study, published some years later as "Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis Immunization and Sudden Infant Death: Results of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Cooperative Epidemiological Study of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Risk Factors," coauthored by: Howard J. Hoffman, Jehu Hunter, Karla Damus, Jean Pakter, Donald R. Peterson, Gerald van Belle, and Eileen G. Hasselmeyer (Pediatrics 79:4 [April, 1987], 598-611.

This "retrospective case-controlled study" involved finding 838 children whose deaths had been classified as SIDS by the attending physician and/or the coroner and comparing them with 1514 "controls."

The 800 "cases" were selected from among all children who died with a diagnosis of SIDS between October, 1978, and December, 1979, at or near certain designated centers. Excluded from the group were: (1) those on whom an autopsy was not performed or was performed with deviations from the standard protocol, (2) those younger than 14 days or older than 24 months, (3) those who died after more than 24 hours in a hospital, and (4) those for whom the parents refused permission to perform an autopsy.

The selection was made by a panel or panels of pathologists who examined the records of the children’s deaths and autopsies and who decided whether or not the child had really died of SIDS or from some other cause.