There are two major objections to this procedure. The first is that the "case" group contained some children who were vaccinated and some who were not. The second is that we are not given the criteria by which the panel of pathologists decided whether or not to include a child as one of the "cases."

On the first objection, the investigators are searching for a tie with vaccination in a group of 800+ infants, some vaccinated and others not. This is contrary to common sense. Why water down the sample with babies who were never vaccinated? At this point the whole methodology for determining whether a previous vaccination may or may not have contributed to the SIDS death in question rapidly becomes incoherent.

This leads to objection #2, which is that we are not given the criteria according to which children were accepted as “cases” by the panel of pathologists, and we cannot judge whether or not this was done correctly.

A typical SIDS post-vaccination case would be the baby with a slight bacterial or viral infection who is vaccinated and then dies of the infection. These cases are invariably classified by attending physicians and coroners as “death from an infection” without taking into account the fact that vaccinations are known to lower resistance momentarily (for a day or two).

In this state of lowered immunity the baby might well die from the infection which would otherwise have been innocuous. So such a case would not even be classified as SIDS (since the infectious “cause” is known), and certainly not as “SIDS after a vaccination,” even though the baby would not have died in the absence of a vaccination. How many such cases were rejected by the "panel of pathologists"? We are not told.

The combination of (1) mixing vaccinated and unvaccinated babies with (2) failure to provide the criteria for acceptance into the “case” group taints this same “case” group irredeemably and, in itself, should prevent any further consideration of this study.

The next step in the investigation was to select two live "controls" for each "case." Control A was "matched" for age with the corresponding "case," meaning that he or she was born as close as possible to the same day. Control B was “matched” not only for date or birth but also for birth weight and race. Again, as with the "cases," these "controls" were mixed with respect to vaccination status, some yes and some no.

The obvious criticism here is that date of birth is simply not relevant to whether or not a baby is vulnerable to the effects of a vaccine (unless the selection is being made on astrological grounds!). Birth weight and race are slightly more relevant, since children of low birthweight and black children (who are more often of low birthweight than white children) are more likely to be affected adversely by vaccination.

However, sex was not included as a criterion, even though males die of SIDS, and are adversely affected by vaccinations, five times more frequently than females. This was a peculiar oversight.

The only comment to be made about this "control" group is that it was selected on entirely incomprehensible grounds. It stands to reason that, when one group is being compared with another group, the two groups must be "matched" with respect to the variable being studied. In this case the variable being studied is “tendency to die after receiving a vaccination. Date of birth has nothing at all to do with this variable, whereas weight and race are only marginally related to it. Sex of the baby, which is related, was not included in the analysis.