There are many sacred cows in the antivaccine movement. One of the most inviolate is that you do not question the stories and anecdotes of mothers who believe that their children became autistic after vaccines. If you do, you will be portrayed as callous, uncaring, and as calling the mother a liar. Of course, as science advocates, we are neither callous nor uncaring, nor are we calling mothers liars. What we question is not what the parents have experienced, but rather the inferences they draw from their experience, namely that vaccines caused their child’s autism. Of course, human nature being what it is, parents who believe that vaccines caused their child’s autism view any questioning of their conclusion that vaccines caused their child’s autism as questioning their story or even as accusing them of lying. I’ve seen this dynamic so many times over the last 15 years that I can’t really even estimate how many. I start out with this observation because I want you to keep it in mind as I discuss a news report about a case that I had been meaning to write about, namely that of Evee Clobes.
Evee Clobes was (note the tense) a six month old girl who tragically died. The antivaccine version of her story, as told by her mother Caitlin Clobes, is that she died 36 hours after a well child visit in which she received several vaccines. The actual version of the story, as determined using evidence, is unfortunately quite different, as you will see. What pushed me to write about this case is a surprising story on NBC News by Brandy Zadrozny (a fellow Polish-American!) that does something I’ve never seen a story in the mainstream press do before, take on Sacred Cow #1 of the antivaccine movement. No, that particular sacred cow isn’t the claims by parents that vaccines caused their children’s autism. Rather, it’s even worse than that. It’s the weaponization of grief, the grief of parents who have lost a child and blame vaccines. Brandy Zadrozny’s story is entitled How anti-vaxxers target grieving moms and turn them into crusaders, and its subtitle is: Anti-vaccine advocates find women whose babies have died unexpectedly and convince them vaccines are to blame. Reading the story, I could not believe that a mainstream news outlet had had the intestinal fortitude to produce a story deconstructing and debunking a story like Caitlin Clobes’ narrative. It’s really amazing:
Since her death in March, Evee has served as a literal poster child for the anti-vaccination movement. Her face and chunky legs — adorned with Band-Aids from her shots — are featured on anti-vaccination websites and billboards. The story of her death is told at protests, read aloud at statehouses, and offered up by her mother and other activists as proof of the horror vaccines can bring.
Evee’s story, as her mother Catelin Clobes tells it, is of a healthy 6-month-old who died 36 hours after a checkup where she got several vaccinations. Clobes and an army of online activists now say the vaccines caused Evee’s death. That belief, and Clobes’ willingness to make Evee part of a national media campaign, have turned the grieving mom into a rising star in the anti-vaccination world. Her Facebook posts draw hundreds of thousands of views, and multiple fundraisers set up by anti-vaccination activists on her behalf have raised tens of thousands of dollars. She has become a champion of other anti-vaccination parents around the country.
But there’s a problem with the story at the heart of this crusade, and with Clobes’ new role as an anti-vaccine heroine. Her local medical examiner has ruled that the evidence — collected in an autopsy and by first responders — shows Evee accidentally suffocated while co-sleeping with her mother.
This story was reported by Brandy Zadrozny and Aliza Nadi, and what makes it highly unusual, perhaps even unique, is that it’s the first story in a mainstream news outlet that I can remember in quite some time—perhaps ever—to critically examine such a story. For instance, even I had hesitated to discuss this case, although it was more because I wasn’t sure of the facts than fear of antivaxers. After all, the same sort of dynamic occurs with families of the victims of cancer quacks, and that’s never stopped me from writing about, for instance, the victims of Stanislaw Burzynski or Clínica 0-19. It’s true, though. The Evee Clobes story has become a cause célèbre among antivaxers, who take it as Gospel that the vaccines the child received before her death are what caused her death. The NBC News story features a billboard with Evee Clobes’ face on it and the slogan “Healthy babies just don’t die” and a link to an antivaccine group, Health Choice Minnesota, which relates the Evee Clobes story this way:
On Wednesday, February 27, 2019, Catie Clobes of Howard Lake, Minnesota brought her normal, healthy 6-month-old baby girl Evee Gayle Clobes to her well-baby checkup, whereupon the pediatrician declared her to be in “perfect health” with no problems or concerns. After Evee was examined by her pediatrician, the nurse administered the standard 6-month doses of Pertussis, Tetanus, Diphtheria, Hepatitis B, Polio, and Pneumococcal vaccines via Prevnar and Pediarix injections. On the evening of Thursday February 28th, Evee was unusually sleepy when Ms. Clobes put her to bed on her back, and checked her at approximately 11:00 p.m. On Friday March 1st at 7:00 a.m., Ms. Clobes discovered her daughter on her back, lifeless and not breathing, and called 911. Evee was rushed to Buffalo Hospital and pronounced dead on arrival.
The story, as told by this antivaccine group, continued, saying that the Anoka County Medical Examiner assured Ms. Clobes that “every test” would be performed and that the “vaccines administered approximately 36 hours prior to her death would definitely be investigated as a possible cause.”
Then this happened:
When Ms. Clobes followed up with the Medical Examiner’s Office in subsequent weeks to confirm that necessary tests were being performed to definitively confirm or rule out vaccine injury, including tests to measure critical proteins, enzymes, serum levels of adjuvants, and markers for inflammation, she was told that “it’s not medically necessary, there is no medical reasoning, and it’s not medically approved.” She was informed that vaccines are not a “medically accepted” cause of death and SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, defined as the unexplained death of an otherwise healthy infant) would appear on Evee’s autopsy report as the determined cause of death.
Evee’s family found this determination unacceptable in absence of complete data.
Of course, the medical examiner was correct. Vaccines are not an accepted cause of SIDS. Indeed, the scientific evidence strongly shows that SIDS is not associated with vaccination. Indeed, if anything, the evidence is suggestive that vaccines lower the risk of SIDS. The problem was that Ms. Clobes, who had already demonstrated that she was susceptible to antivaccine blandishments by requesting that the medical examiner investigate them as a cause of her daughter’s death, had apparently already made up her mind that vaccines must have been responsible.
No one doubts that Ms. Clobes loved her daughter or that Evee Clobes’ death was tragic. Any time a baby dies, it’s a loss that devastates a family. The problem is that antivaxers know that and use it, along with the very human need to have some sort of explanation, a defined cause, for a loss as horrific as the loss of a child. Ms. Clobes had lost a daughter, and she needed to know why. Unfortunately, she latched onto a reason, just as antivax parents with autistic children latch onto the same cause: Vaccines. Worse, encouraging parents of children with SIDS to come to the conclusions that vaccines had killed their child is a feature, not a bug, of the antivaccine movement, as Zadrozny and Nadi report:
Anti-vaccination activists have long targeted their message to parents of autistic kids. They have also, however, pursued another vulnerable population of parents searching for answers — mothers and fathers of babies who have died unexpectedly, especially when the deaths are linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS. At a time when the U.S. faces the largest outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses in decades, a network of activists is finding new recruits to the anti-vaccination cause by raising questions about the sudden deaths of several dozen babies and young children.
That network includes discredited physician-turned-anti-vaccination celebrity Andrew Wakefield, whose retracted study popularized the false belief that vaccines are linked to autism; Del Bigtree, a former “Dr. Phil” producer who runs the country’s most well-funded anti-vaccine nonprofit, Informed Consent Action Network; and social media activist Larry Cook, who hosts the largest and most active anti-vaccination community on Facebook.
Since 2018, Cook has published at least 20 different articles alleging a baby’s death was the result of a vaccination — despite official, medically supported explanations that include SIDS, pneumonia and accidental asphyxiation. Clobes joined Cook’s group after Evee died, and her story is among Cook’s 20.
Larry Cook, as you recall, runs Facebook’s largest antivaccine page, Stop Mandatory Vaccination. Before we get into how Evee Clobes’ story spread, first, let’s note how the antivaccine version of the Evee Clobes’ story differs from what actually happened:
The day after Evee died — before the medical examiner had issued any findings — Clobes started pouring out her heartbreak and confusion on Facebook.
“This feeling of pain is indescribable,” Clobes wrote next to a video of Evee laughing that has now been viewed over half a million times and attracted 3,000 comments. “The unanswered questions of how or why make it worse.”
Clobes’ grief and Evee’s giggle were like a siren, attracting dozens of family and friends, and then hundreds and thousands of strangers offering condolences in the comments.
Within hours of her post, some had answers.
“Vaccine injury is real and a movement is spreading across the nation,” one woman wrote. “Organizations are filled with people and parents who understand what you are going through and can help offer guidance and support to you.”
I’ve written about this phenomenon before. Antivaxers have long weaponized grieving mothers, just as cancer quacks weaponize the families of cancer patients with terminal disease. The reason? If you dare question their stories, you can be portrayed as heartless, “attacking” a massively sympathetic figure. They take advantage of the human tendency of parents who suffer a tragedy as painful as the sudden and unexpected loss of a child to need an explanation, a “why.” Antivaxers are masters at this. Antivaxers bait their hook with a seemingly reasonable explanation for the child’s death, and the parents’ hunger for any explanation all too often leads them to take the bait and be reeled into the movement, usually through social media and other online discussion forums. It’s a process that John Laidler, who once believed that vaccines cause autism but eventually saw the light and became a skeptic, has described before.
After being reeled in, grieving parents receive empathy aplenty and a new, powerful social support network to help them through their grief. After all, to antivaxers they’re martyrs who unknowingly “sacrificed” their children to the “vaccine god.” That same grief is then weaponized, forging these surviving parents into human shields against critics, and a powerful “in” to gain access to lawmakers and powerful people. Who would turn down a meeting with a grieving mother? Who wouldn’t give her a respectful hearing? What reporter would risk appearing callous reporting on such parents? What parents wouldn’t feel their pain?
Of course, that empathy and support also serve to pull the parents deeper and deeper into the antivaccine mindset. In the case of Evee Clobes’ mother, this meant:
The next week, a local activist helped Clobes set up a fundraiser through GoFundMe with the goal of raising $5,000 for a “private autopsy” and other expenses related to Clobes’ quest for answers. (Clobes has received more than $22,000 and has raised the goal to $40,000.)
For the autopsy — more precisely, a study of tissue samples retained by Wright County — Clobes’ lawyer hired Dr. Douglas Miller, a clinical professor of pathology at the University of Missouri and one of the few mainstream medical professionals anti-vaccination activists seem to respect. He has served as an expert witness for parents who filed lawsuits claiming vaccines triggered SIDS in their children. Clobes said on social media that Miller would be doing the study.
I’ve mentioned Dr. Miller before in the context of a SIDS case that was incorrectly ruled on by the Vaccine Court. He seems to have a nice little side business testifying as an “expert witness” in SIDS cases in which the parents blame vaccines for their child’s death, charging $500 an hour. Do you want to know how weak the Evee Clobes case was? Even Dr. Miller wouldn’t take it:
Miller said his investigation found no evidence that vaccines had contributed to Evee’s death. He said he told Clobes of his conclusion, and had declined to support her case in the federal government’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, known more commonly as Vaccine Court. He declined to name the factors that led to his decision, citing concern for Clobes’ privacy.
Online, however, Clobes claimed Dr. Miller’s report offered “proof” that Evee had suffered “a cellular infiltration triggered by an immune response from the vaccinations.”
According to Dr. Miller in the news story, the “neuropathologist Clobes referred to ‘was not me, if he or she actually exists,'” and added, “I did not tell Ms. Clobes of any such finding, and I did not provide her or her attorney with any report which alleged any such finding.” Whom to believe? If Caitlin Clobes had Dr. Miller’s report, she could simply have produced it for the reporters. She didn’t.
Worse, now Ms. Clobes is going beyond Evee. She’s become a committed activist. Evee Clobes has become the face of a Health Choice Minnesota’s branding campaign, and Ms. Clobes has appeared on Highwire with Del Bigtree:
In September, Clobes appeared on nationally known anti-vaccination advocate Del Bigtree’s online talk show, “The HighWire.” Clobes hinted she might sue the Wright County medical examiner over a “cover-up.” Bigtree interspersed his interview with Clobes with home videos of Evee and a re-enactment of her death.
In an interview with NBC News, Bigtree dismissed the suggestion that claims like Clobes’ deserve extra scrutiny.
“All I’m doing is letting her tell her story,” said Bigtree, whose nonprofit brought in $1.4 million in revenue in 2017— more than any comparable group. He compared his work to media coverage of the #MeToo movement, in which women have made sexual assault allegations against powerful men. “Are we not supposed to listen to the women?”
God, I so detest Bigtree. Here he is trying to liken the antivaccine movement to the “Me Too” movement. They are not even remotely the same. No one says we shouldn’t listen to parents like Evee Clobes’ mom. Here’s the difference between Clobes and the Me Too movement. Me Too is not about concluding some sort of scientific causation. Stories like the one Ms. Clobes tells about Evee are all about promoting a narrative falsely concluding that vaccines kill children. Certainly, we can believe Caitlin Clobes’ story that she found her daughter dead after co-sleeping with her. However, there is no reason for us to accept Ms. Clobes’ conclusion that it was the vaccines, not SIDS likely due to co-sleeping, that resulted in her daughter’s death.
Another tidbit from this report is that sometimes antivaxers co-opt dead babies to use in their messaging, even when the parents do not want their baby’s death used that way. For instance, citing the case of Nicholas Catone, a 20-month-old who died suddenly in 2017 and whose parents think vaccines that he had received three weeks earlier were what killed him, the reporters recount the case of Sophia Cooney, whose father Mark most definitely did not want her death used to promote the antivaccine narrative that vaccines killed her. It was a truly tragic accident, in which the baby’s mother Laura Stanard, was lying on the couch breastfeeding Sophia and fell asleep still holding her. Also, the Stanard had been smoking weed earlier in the day. So this was clearly a case of accidental asphyxiation of the infant due to co-sleeping., and, even though Stanard had been careless, I still have enormous sympathy for her, just as I do for Clobes.
Did the fact that Sophia’s death was clearly not due to vaccines stop antivaxers? Nope. Did it stop Caitlin Clobes? Sadly, no. She was on a mission:
On the six-month anniversary of Sophia’s death, Cooney saw that a stranger named Catie Clobes had posted a GoFundMe campaign to Facebook, asking for donations to help Stanard with “bills and expenses” after Sophia’s death. Sophia is one of six babies in as many months whose deaths, without medical evidence, Clobes has promoted to her 10,000 followers and various Facebook groups as vaccine-related. Articles about Sophia soon followed on websites like Stop Mandatory Vaccination, which posted the story with the headline, “Infant Dies 14 Hours After Receiving 8 Vaccines.” The article is one of the site’s most popular this year, getting some 57,000 Facebook likes, comments and shares, according to a Buzzsumo analysis.
When he saw the posts, Cooney said: “I couldn’t breathe. It’s like someone was making a mockery of my precious little Sophie.”
Cooney asked Stanard, Clobes and then GoFundMe to take down Sophia’s campaign, and when those requests were ignored, he contacted the Fort Collins police, who opened an investigation into the GoFundMe account. After Cooney, friends and family loaded the campaign’s comment section with complaints, it was taken down, having raised just $225. No charges were filed.
Sophia Cooney’s death was even more obviously not due to vaccines than that of Evee Clobes. In a way, I can understand Laura Stanard’s reaction. Her negligence had led to the death of her child, and she knew it. She had even admitted it to the police! The guilt must have been staggering, almost impossible to bear. Naturally, one way to alleviate that guilt would be for her to convince herself that it wasn’t her mistake that had led to Sophia’s death, but vaccines. If that were the case, then Stanard could view herself as blameless. I can easily understand how a human being would grasp at straws to relieve such oppressive guilt. I can actually understand Caitlin Clobes’ reaction, too, as a manifestation of the same sort of guilt.
Indeed, it’s not just grief, but guilt, that antivaxers are excellent at using to recruit parents like Clobes and Stanard:
Stanard said in a brief conversation over Facebook Messenger that she had approached Clobes after seeing her story on Facebook. “I chose to reach out because who wouldn’t reach out to someone who went through the same thing?” Stanard said. “Everyone just wants to find someone to relate to and I finally found someone who actually believed me.”
Who better to recruit a grieving mother than another grieving mother, who just happened to have used her grief to turn into an antivaccine activist?
I must say that Cooney’s reaction is more level-headed than mine likely would have been if I had had the misfortune to experience what he did:
Cooney doesn’t blame his ex for convincing herself that vaccines killed Sophia, but he is angry just the same.
“I just want the truth out there: Babies asphyxiate, this happens,” Cooney said. “These anti-vaccination people are continuously contacting parents who have lost children, giving them false information and false hope. This stuff is wrong.”
Cooney is, of course, absolutely correct.
Worse, Caitlin Clobes is using her daughter to endanger public health:
Clobes calls Evee a “superhero” for her posthumous role in the anti-vaccine movement. On her Facebook page, Clobes posts screenshots of messages from parents who, she says, have seen her story and been persuaded not to vaccinate their children. The Catones post similar images along with the hashtag #onestarfishatatime, a reference to an inspirational story in which a boy, faced with a beach of dying starfish, saves as many as he can, one by one.
While it’s impossible to measure the impact of these stories on vaccination rates or public opinion, it’s safe to say they’ve been seen and shared millions of times.
Yes, Clobes is actually proud of using Evee’s story to dissuade parents from vaccinating. That’s how radicalized she has become. After all, she believes that vaccines, not SIDS/co-sleeping, killed her baby. How radicalized would you or I become if we suffered such a loss and somehow came to believe that?
Finally, this story helps illustrate just why antivaccine warriors like Caitlin Clobe are so powerful, using her interaction with Senator Pan over SB 276 and SB 714 as an example:
Last week, California state Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who led the bill’s push, got into a Twitter spat with the actor Rob Schneider, who argued against the legislation by sharing Clobes’ post.
“Catie has my sympathy for the loss of her daughter Evee,” Pan replied to Schneider on Twitter. “Blaming her death on vaccination requires proof.”
Pan’s remarks were seized on as heartless by Clobes’ supporters, who accused him of attacking a grieving mother.
I wouldn’t have said it quite the way Senator Pan did. I probably would have said something like, “Ms. Clobes has my sympathy for the loss of her daughter Evee, but there is no evidence that vaccines were responsible.” I know, I would have gotten the same reaction, but how I would have handled it just sounded better to me. Be that as it may, this is the power of mothers like Caitlin Clobes, who have lost a child to whatever cause. (I’ve documented teens who’ve died suddenly, whom antivaxers have used to demonize the HPV vaccine, for instance. With older children and teens, it’s almost always the HPV vaccine, too, but that is a topic for another day.) These mothers’ loss and grief are their shields, and their motivations are pure, at least in the beginning, making it easy to portray anyone who questions their belief that vaccines killed their babies as heartlessly attacking a grieving mother. Unfortunately, antivaxers know this, which is why they continue to approach them and try to recruit them. It’s also why antivaxers so furiously attack the mothers of children who have died of vaccine-preventable diseases and take the brave step of publicizing their stories in pro-vaccination messaging. Antivaxers recognize a threat when they see one.
Read the whole story. I’ve excerpted somewhat liberally, but it’s long and worth reading in its entirety. Also, Dorit Reiss posted a good discussion at Skeptical Raptor.
28 replies on “The tragic death of Evee Clobes: How antivaxers recruit grieving mothers to their cause”
“According to Dr. Miller in the news story, the “neuropathologist Clobes referred to ‘was not me, if he or she actually exists,”
Ouch.
Yep. I wonder who her “expert” is.
I probably would have responded closer to ORac, with something like “The death of a child is a tragedy, and Ms. Clobes has my deepst sympathy, but there is no evidence that vaccines caused this and insisting that we focus on vaccines despite the lack of evidence prevents us from investing in protecting children from thngs we know place them at risk.” Sadly, I feel like “wasting resources” is the thing that will resonate better with certain types than “putting children at risk fo unneeded disease.”
Here in Phoenix The Arizona Republic did refute a claim by state representative Nancy Barto (an anti-vaxxer to the extreme) that vaccines caused a 4 month old’s death. This was done in May of this year. Not a national news story, but they are the biggest paper in Arizona and they also put it up on their AZCentral web site. Barto had put out her ridiculous claim in a prior op-ed that the Republic had run (probably mostly out of obligation to not censor a legislator, no matter how bat sh*t anti-vax they are).
But seeing an outlet like NBC refute these exploitative claims by anti-vaxxers is even more encouraging.
That’s really reassuring, re the Arizona paper.
Unfortunately, Dr. Hickie, you’ve got this going on this weekend:
Good article: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/phoenix-vaccine-education-summit-promises-anti-vax-propaganda-11362477
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One of the grifters putting this Sheraton Inn laughingstock on:
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Article/264852-2019-07-19-update-vaccine-education-summit-09-28-2019-sheraton-crescent-phx.htm
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I love how they use hotel conference rooms just like Psychics, Mediums, and NuAge crystal clutchers use for their “conferences”.
No nasty, contaminated university or large professional organization involved – just the grifters…
Dull Bigtwig; James Lying-Weiler; Judy “There are retroviruses in everything!!!!” Mikovitz; Wayne “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout science” Rohde; Jonathan “I’m an emasculated Scientologist” Lockwood; a chiroquack; etc.
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No matter what, the anti-vaccine grifting curcuit must go on…
Thanks, Reality for linking to the New Times article, which I hadn’t yet seen. I can’t make that conference d/t a busy weekend, and shelling $100 to endure the stupidity of these twits like Bigtree and Lying-Wailer is hard to justify. Lockwood is the one to watch–my concern is the anti-vax legislators are feeling empowered to be more aggressive in AZ next year, esp if someone like Lockwood advises them as he’s done for AVers in Oregon and California.
The “Mystic Visions Spiritual Gallery” has just opened around the corner with garish signage. What should have been installed instead is some sort of proactive human-services agency, given the number of people lying on the street in this rathole of a neighborhood.
One thing. The initial conclusion was, Ms. Clobes is correct, undetermined. I have heard that coroners say that sometimes to spare families’ feelings. I think this initial report did Ms. Clobes no favors, and a blunt first report would have spared her much later grief – and helped chnanel her energies to positive causes, like fighting against unsafe sleep, where she could do good instead of harm.
I agree with Dorit. It’s always better to call a spade a spade. There may be consequences, but they are always worse when you have to change a report later.
I am encouraged that Dr. Miller denies supporting the anti-vax narrative. I did not have that kind of confidence in him. I knew him a while back when I was a resident.
@Dorit – The initial conclusion was, Ms. Clobes is correct, undetermined. I have heard that coroners say that sometimes to spare families’ feelings.
Interesting… This doesn’t seem legal or science based. Would you please expand more on this topic and cite an example or reference?
It certainly isn’t scientific. This discusses this some. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/understanding-sids/485147/
“There are also cultural factors at play. Some infant deaths that are eventually explained—a baby who suffocates because of loose bedding in her crib, for example, or when an adult rolls onto her in a shared bed—are sometimes classified as SIDS deaths anyway, out of sensitivity to traumatized parents grieving the death of their newborn.
“We definitely know that coroners and medical examiners have tendencies to certify deaths differently—and particularly when we are working with the coroner population, because they’re elected officials and oftentimes they’re working in smaller communities where they may be on first-name basis with these families,” Brown said. “It’s difficult for them in some situations to work on a case, and say to the family that something the family did or did not do led directly to the death of their child.”
“A really important part of a SUID-scene investigation is doing a doll re-enactment,” she added. But it’s difficult to ask a grieving family to participate in such an exercise.”
In part the article drew on this study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27113380
That billboard is bugging me. “Healthy babies don’t just die” They do, every damn day. Car crashes, dog attack, drowning, falls, choking, asphyxiation, and far too many other causes. It’s tragic but it’s true. And the bloody anti-vaxxers can’t even see that they’re displaying their ignorance and lack of thought there too.
And antivaxxers hyperfixation on vaccines means taking resources away from those causes.
“Healthy babies don’t just die”
Not just babies. Three years ago my great nephew and his wife put their (then) 18-month old daughter to sleep at night and she died in bed. After all the investigations (of them and in search of a cause) no reason was found.
My kids were born about the time the “Safe to Sleep” campaign was just beginning, and was in full swing after my youngest was born. Though I found it difficult to sleep in the same room with an infant because they are just so noisy. They make all sorts of little sounds that make a new parent jump up and check. So I put the bassinet in the hallway about ten feet away with a door partially open.
Unfortunately it was close enough to nurse in bed, and it was fortunate that both boys decided to come to the big bed, that I was awakened enough to put the baby back into the bassinet. It was a water bed, so bouncy bouncy bouncy. So I was lucky.
Later when we got a phone modem and I saw the anti-vaccine rhetoric increasing on the listserv I was on for my oldest kid’s disability and elsewhere online I learned to search the early version of PubMed. I found this study using VAERS data published in 1999 about HepB vaccine and SIDS: archneur.jamanetwork.com/data/Journals/PEDS/8503/poa9078.pdf
Apparently a few involve co-sleeping, the most heart wrenching is the one baby that was “found on back on floor beside couch.”
There are multiple stories in my family of infants who nearly were smothered by accident. My dad rolled over once, not realizing I was in the bed next to him (my mom had set me down to go to the bathroom), and he nearly put the pillow on top of me. The same thing happened to my uncle with my cousin. This was 70s/80s, so pre “Safe to Sleep” efforts. Given the number of close calls I know about, I’m almost shocked tragedies such as this aren’t more common. The guilt when tragedy must be beyond what I can comprehend, and I understand why parents look for something else to blame. “It’s not my fault. I did what they told me to do. It’s their fault.”
Historically it was called “overlaying” and was a sadly common cause of infant and child deaths. That was back when no one really had any choice about bed sharing, since you probably only had one bed for everyone.
I watched the very exploitative video and interview of Ms. Clobes on Del Bigtree’s Highwire show, aired September 12, 2019.
Some aspects of Ms. Clobes’s account troubled me, so I spent the next week learning as much as I could about what we know now about SIDS and Accidental Suffocation and Strangulation in Bed (ASSB), and how medical examiners investigate infant deaths, publishing Evee Gayle Clobes: A Tragic Death, Exploited on my blog on the 18th. I only had access to the materials that Ms. Clobes had made available in the course of the Highwire show. I wanted to be clear that bed-sharing caused Evee’s death, and that Ms. Clobes’s need for grief support and counseling had not been met — creating a vacuum for the ghouls at Larry Cook’s monetization of tragedy to fill.
My thought in writing is that if Dr. Strobl (the Medical Examiner) had listed Evee’s cause of death as accidental suffocation from bed-sharing in March, shortly after Evee’s death, and if Ms. Clobes had had proper grief counseling, she would have been far less likely to have fallen into the clutches of the anti-vaccine group.
Now, I think she is far too deeply entrenched. I have seen screenshots of the comments Ms. Clobes is getting on her Facebook page following the publication of the NBC news report (and a rehashed version from the UK’s Daily Mail) — they are all adulatory, and encourage her to “keep up the fight”.
I read your blog post on the topic Liz and I couldn’t agree more. This was a tragic death and it’s sad that anyone has to write about this but it needs to be done so thanks to all who have done so and with compassion, sensitivity and facts.
Reading details about what the police immediately found**, I could see no way that anyone could deny that the child was face down for some period of time- there’s only one way that that which was described could happen.
Only anti-vax fanatics would manipulate a grieving parent like this and lead her away from the truth.
But then, if you call a shaken baby a vaccine injury to support your BS, you’re capable of anything.
** I leave the description for others to read if they haven’t already
“When Ms. Clobes followed up with the Medical Examiner’s Office in subsequent weeks to confirm that necessary tests were being performed to definitively confirm or rule out vaccine injury, including tests to measure critical proteins, enzymes, serum levels of adjuvants, and markers for inflammation, she was told that “it’s not medically necessary, there is no medical reasoning, and it’s not medically approved.” ”
Do enough LDTs, and something is eventually going to come up. What that something is and what it means is why I have a job, but to the anti-vaxxers, it’s always Vaccine Damage.
“Serum levels of adjuvants” in particular is a headdesk. I can imagine…
It takes an ‘expert’ to watch the re-enactment, read the reports & realize that Catie wasn’t even in the same room when the baby died, let alone ‘accidentally smothering’ her?
SMH.
Ms. Clobes story was that she got up, went to the bathroom, and realized her child was dead when she came back. I am not sure where you read from that that she was not in the room when the child died; there is nothing in that story to counter the child being already (tragically) dead before she went to the restroom.
I am not saying she smothered her. Putting a child in unsafe sleep conditions isn’t actively smothering and is a tragic mistake many parents make.
And yes, the expertise helped identify the circumstances of death.
Dorit, were you there in the house when Evee passed. NOPE! This is not your story to tell so get a damn life you pharma paid whore.
[…] was encouraging patients to use every means to fundraise to afford his treatments. More recently, antivaxxers have tried to use the platform to fundraise for various purposes, Larry Cook in particular. The question then becomes: What to […]
@Orac and @Dorit… just want to make sure you guys got the memo from the World Vaccine Safety Commission… The WHO doesn’t want you using the term “antivaxxer” anymore because it’s considered hate speech and it’s making you all look bad. You “can’t afford to lose one more person…” The truth is being spread across the globe and the science is not settled. #wearewinning
Antivaxxers as the parents are called here, were obedient to their doctors’ recommendations and vaccinated their children. What happened then was a complete surprise to them, and denied by their doctors. Listen to the following video to hear scientists state true facts about safety and vaccines. https://youtu.be/s2IujhTdCLE