Word to Steve Kirsch: The 1990s called. They want their antivax lies about shaken baby syndrome back

Roughly three decades ago now, there arose a particularly vile and insidious antivax lie, specifically the claim that the clinical entity known as “shaken baby syndrome” (these days called abusive head trauma) was in actuality a “misdiagnosis” for vaccine injury. Although it is not clear exactly who was responsible for originating the myth or when, it is clear that two sources were very much responsible for popularizing the lie. The first was Australian geologist named Viera Scheibner. The second were fans of a man named Alan Yurko, who was initially convicted in 1999 for the death of his girlfriend’s ten week old infant. Ever since then, the lie that shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma is in reality a “misdiagnosis” for “vaccine injury” has been a major part of antivaccine lore, promoted by a number of antivaxxers over the years, as well as by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), otherwise know (to me, at least) as a medical John Birch Society disguised as a medical professional society. So I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me when tech bro turned rabid antivaxxer Steve Kirsch posted on his Substack an article entitled The new rise of “shaken baby syndrome,” complete with a photo of a brain-injured child, you know, because that’s the sort of thing vile antivaxxers like Kirsch do.

In yet another example of how in the age of COVID-19 everything antivax that was old—and, make no mistake, this particular lie is very, very old—is seemingly new again, at least if you’re a Johnny-come-lately antivaxxer like Steve Kirsch:

Parents who follow their physician’s advice to vaccinate their kids can find that their child subsequently develops encephalitis soon after vaccination (more likely when multiple vaccines are given at once and even more likely if the child has an infection at the time of vaccination) which then becomes a permanent brain injury.

Their doctor then reports the parents to Child Protective Services for “shaken baby syndrome” and their child is taken away.

Physicians are never to blame of course, because vaccines are safe and effective.

Funny how Kirsch posts this as though he’s discovered something new, as though this hoary lie hasn’t been part and parcel of antivax disinformation for at least 30 years. What’s particularly nasty about this particular lie is that antivaxxers frequently use it to try to defend child abusers and help them avoid paying the price for their crimes. For example, Vera Schreiber was doing just that in the 1990s, as this 2003 article in Australian Doctor describes:

Dr Scheibner describes herself as a retired principal research scientist who formerly worked with the NSW Government. Her PhD is in micropalaeontology, which she says focused on “ecology, palaeontology and the reconstruction of past marine environments based on microscopic fossils and climates”. 

She attributes shaken baby syndrome to brain swelling and bleeding, and bone fragility induced by vaccination.

When questioned about the motivation behind her claims that children can build a natural immunity to tetanus, that smallpox has not been wiped out but has been re-classified as other pox viruses, and that vaccines are the single biggest cause of SIDS, she says: “I only satisfy my conscience. I am a scientist … I don’t care if people agree or are against me, I know I am stating the truth.”

See what I mean? This article is over 20 years old, and I bet you will recognize some of those claims, such as the whopper that vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). They don’t. Of course, I note that even before he started claiming that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury, Steve Kirsch had also already latched onto the old antivax chestnut blaming vaccines for SIDS. Schreiber, for her part, has apparently been promoting the false claim that vaccines cause a SIDS-like syndrome that is falsely attributed to abusive head trauma way back in 1996. I haven’t been able to tell if she was the one who originated this claim. Probably not. I rather suspect that she just picked up on something that had been made up before and ran with it. Whoever thought of this lie first, though, it’s been around a long, long time.

Kirsch continues:

While this is unlikely to happen to any of my readers who know better than to ever vaccinate their kids, it is happening to parents who are not aware that vaccine risks outweigh the benefits because they rely on their doctors for medical advice.

Also, DPT vaccine injuries were also often attributed to shaken baby syndrome. And SIDS was partially created to cover up vaccine deaths.

This is becoming more prevalent now with COVID vaccines being part of the mix.

Seriously, Kirsch is like a Mad Libs of antivaccine disinformation, regurgitating it seemingly at random without being able to make anything resembling a coherent argument. However, the issue with DPT (the version of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine that used whole cell pertussis) does suggest that the antivaccine shaken baby syndrome narrative likely arose in the 1980s, around the time that it was suspected that DPT was causing brain damage. You might recall that the DPT scare originated as a result of a documentary, DPT: Vaccine Roulette, which first aired on a local NBC affiliate in Washington DC on April 19, 1982, and then ultimately was aired nationally on The Today Show. This particular bit of muckraking was arguably the spark that resulted in the big bang of the modern anti-vaccine movement. During the 1980s, it was thought that the whole cell pertussis vaccine (abbreviated DTwP, for diptheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis, as opposed to the DTaP, which is now used and in which the “a” stands for “acellular”) was responsible for encephalitis and brain damage in children, based on sensational case reports in the media, like the ones in Vaccine Roulette. Early studies even suggested that there might be an association between the whole cell pertussis vaccine and the encephalopathy attributed in the media to it, but, as Steve Novella pointed out, later studies did not support his association.

The claim about shaken baby syndrome is even more disgusting, though. In the moment, before the studies exonerating the whole-cell DPT were published years later, it was not unreasonable to be concerned, and, indeed, the public health establishment was sufficiently concerned to develop a new version of the DTP vaccine, the DTaP vaccine, that did not use whole cell pertussis. Note, however, that, if her account is true, Vera Schreiber helped child abusers avoid punishment:

Dr Scheibner has written two self-published books against vaccination, and often addresses community gatherings in Australia and overseas. She has achieved substantial media coverage in almost 20 years of committed lobbying.

She says since 1996 she has been asked to write expert reports for the defence in about 80 cases of shaken baby syndrome in the UK, US and Australia.

“In many cases, when the prosecution received my report, the charges were dropped,” she says. 

This is not something to be proud of, helping child abusers get off.

Speaking of child abusers getting off, the case of Alan Yurko is instructive. To remind those of you not familiar with this particularly odious excuse for a human being, I’ll briefly relate who he is and why he’s so vile. I first learned of this the lie that Kirsch is regurgitating when I learned of the case of Alan Yurko. Yurko gained “fame” (if you can call it that) when he was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1999 for the murder of his 10-week-old son, who was shaken to death. Somehow, Yurko became the centerpiece of a campaign (Free Yurko) that featured as the centerpiece of its argument for Yurko’s innocence the claim that shaken baby syndrome is in realty “vaccine injury” and that Yurko’s son died not of injuries sustained by being vigorous shaken by Yurko but by “vaccine injury.” Unfortunately, ultimately Yurko was released early, not because the courts agreed with the lie that it was vaccine injury, not shaken baby syndrome, that killed Yurko’s son. Rather, it was because apparently the coroner’s office where the autopsy was done on the dead baby was the most shoddily run morgue ever and incompetent coroner ever. As Australian skeptic Peter Bowditch put it:

I want you to think about a dead baby. This baby was ten weeks old when he died. The autopsy revealed bleeding around the brain, in the eyes and in the spinal column. There were bruises on the sides of his head. Another thing that the autopsy showed was four broken ribs. These fractures had started to heal, and therefore indicated a pattern of physical abuse prior to the date of death. The father admitted to holding the baby by his feet and hitting him shortly before he died. I now want to you to form an opinion of the father. If you are the sort of person who opposes vaccination, you would see this man as a hero. You would see him as a martyr to the cause and would try to get him released from prison. In a breathtaking demonstration of what it can mean to believe that the end justifies the means, the anti-vaccination liars have adopted Alan Yurko as a symbol that they can use to frighten parents into refusing vaccination for their children. You can read a loathsome justification for this murderer at http://www.woodmed.com/ShakenBabyAlan.htm.

I’ve discussed the case of Alan Yurko and the antivaccine movement’s most shameless vile lie (namely, that shaken baby syndrome is a “misdiagnosis” for vaccine injury) in detail before on more than one occasion. It’s a “concept” that one Harold Buttram of AAPS had joined Vera Schreibner in championing, although others, like Catherine Frompovich and F. Edward Yazbak, had also promoted this concept, which had allowed a baby killer to avoid punishment. Fortunately, he was also a criminal for other reasons and still did prison time, but you get the idea.

Nor was Alan Yurko the only one to use this claim to try to avoid punishment for killing an infant. In 2012, Elwood Sadowsky tried the same lie to void his life sentence with the help of antivaxxers Harold Buttram and John D. Lloyd, who basically said, “Never mind the multiple skull fractures and triad of injuries suffered by the baby girl, Amanda Sadowsky, that are associated with shaken baby syndrome, like retinal hemorrhages (bleeding into the linings of the eyes); subdural hemorrhages (bleeding beneath the dural membrane); and encephalopathy (damage to the brain affecting function). It was the vaccines specifically the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, which was “never investigated.” Of course it was never investigated. The very idea was bullshit, with no scientific evidence to support it!

Back in the day, before the pandemic, I used to say that the idea that vaccines cause shaken baby syndrome was so fringe—or, as I put it, so detestable that even some of the most rabid antivaccine activists out there generally wouldn’t touch it with the proverbial ten-foot cattle prod—that “mainstream” antivaxxers and their orgs avoided it like the plague, lest they be correctly perceived as defending baby killers. Apparently buying into a lie used in the past by antivaxxers to allow baby killers like Alan Yurko and the child abusers assisted by Viera Schreiber in the 1990s to avoid justice is not too far down the rabbit hole for Steve Kirsch. For him, there appears to be no bottom.