Even though these two groups are not comparable, Drs. Hoffman et al. compared them anyway, finding that "only" 39.8% of the "cases" had received at least one DPT shot, while 55% of Control A infants and 53.2% of Control B infants had received at least one DPT shot. Since fewer “cases” than "controls" had received the shot, the authors concluded that “DTP immunization is not a significant [what do they mean by "significant?"] factor in the occurrence of SIDS.

This sort of attempted comparison can only be described as a shambles, a grotesque imitation of scientific method designed to fool the public (and the journalists who are supposed to be monitoring precisely this sort of intellectual dishonesty). It would have made as much sense to interview the first 1600 people they could pick up in the Greyhound Bus Station and ask them about their vaccination status.

But this article had its effect. Dr. Torch was effectively silenced, and for years this pseudo-science has been cited as one of the medical establishment’s principal weapons in its drive to extend childhood vaccination programs.

How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one.

Another article on the SIDS-vaccination relationship, fortunately of far superior quality, is Larry J. Baraff, Wendy J. Ablon, and Robert C. Weiss, "Possible Temporal Association Between Diphtheria-Tetanus Toxoid-Pertussis Vaccination and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." (Pediatric Infectious Diseases 2:1 [January, 1983], 7-11). The authors adopted a simpler, intuitively obvious method of investigation and concluded that there is, indeed, a "temporal association" between the DPT shot and sudden infant death.

They found that 382 cases of SIDS were recorded in Los Angeles County between January 1, 1979, and August 23, 1980, and they simply interviewed the parents of 145 of these cases, either in person or by telephone. They asked: 1) the baby’s sex, 2) the age at death, 3) the last visit to a physician or nurse prior to death, 4) the date of the last vaccination, 5) the name and telephone number of the physician or nurse, and 6) the type of immunization given.

They found a statistically significant excess of deaths in the first day and the first week after vaccination, i.e., a "temporal association."

They rejected the use of a "control group," and instead relied on the intuitively obvious assumption that "there should be no temporal association between DPT immunization and SIDS were there no causal relationship between these two events." I have not found any criticism of this article for relying on “anecdotal evidence.

This study was not financed by the US Government but apparently by the UCLA School of Medicine and the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Another respectable study of the SIDS-vaccination connection is "Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussis Immunization and Suddent Infant Death Syndrome" by Alexander M. Walker, Hershel Jick, David R. Perera, Robert S. Thompson, and Thomas A. Knauss, published in the American Journal of Public Health 77:8 [August, 1987], 945-951.

This study supports a link between the DPT shot and “sudden infant death syndrome. The authors examined the records of all children born in the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound between 1972 and 1983 to see how many had died of SIDS. Total births recorded during this period were 35,581, but of them only 26,500 were eligible for the study. Not all deaths of infants during this period were considered to be SIDS. All deaths which on the basis of death certificate diagnosis, hospital discharge data, and pharmacy use taken together could be clearly ascribed to causes not related to immunization were excluded.” Ultimately, “SIDS was defined as any death for which no cause could be discerned among infants of normal birthweight and without predisposing medical conditions. But, despite these exclusions and restrictions, the authors found “the SIDS mortality rate in the period 0-3 days following a DPT shot to be 7.3 times that in the period beginning 30 days after immunization.