Media Slam NIH for Axing ‘Safe to Sleep’ Campaign — But Evidence Shows the Program Never Reduced SIDS Deaths

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) program that health officials claimed reduced the number of infants who died suddenly in their sleep fell victim late last month to budget cuts, triggering an outcry from some experts and mainstream media.

The 30-year-old “Safe to Sleep” campaign was overseen by the NIH communications office at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The program cut was part of the ongoing reorganization and streamlining of the NIH.

The program, which includes TV advertisements, was created to provide guidance to parents about safe sleeping practices for infants. It advises parents to place babies on their back to sleep, use a flat firm sleeping surface, keep the sleeping area clear, use a pacifier, and breastfeed, among other lifestyle interventions. That information will remain available on the website.

North Country Public Radio, Mother Jones and other mainstream media decried the program’s cancellation.

In an article published May 5, Mother Jones claimed “Safe to Sleep” was responsible for “years of progress in reducing the number of babies that succumb to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).”

The article smeared Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and others who suggest that the sudden and unexplained death of thousands of infants each year, often within a few days of vaccination, may in some cases be linked to vaccines rather than to sleep hygiene.

However, the plausible association between vaccines and SIDS has been reported in peer-reviewed literature for decades.

And research published in top journals has long shown that claims about the success of the “Safe to Sleep” campaign are mistaken. SIDS deaths didn’t go down after the campaign was launched in the 1990s. The deaths were simply categorized differently because of a change to the codes used by medical examiners.

A short history of SIDS in the U.S. 

A SIDS diagnosis is given when an infant under age 1 dies suddenly, typically during sleep, and an investigation into the death fails to yield a cause. However, 95% of SIDS deaths occur in the first six months of life, peaking at ages 2-4 months.

Each year, the U.S. records more than five infant deaths per 1,000 live births, far exceeding the rates in other high-income countries.

After birth defects and prematurity, SIDS is the third leading cause of death among infants. Yet the medical industry claims to remain puzzled about the cause — similar to how health officials say they don’t know what causes autism.

The SIDS diagnosis didn’t exist until the late 1960s, when the category was created in response to a rise in sudden unexplained infant deaths. In 1971, the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) assigned a code to SIDS.

The ICD is the list of about 130 categories that coroners globally use to assign the cause of death when a baby dies.

In a 2021 article in the peer-reviewed journal Toxicology Reports, vaccine researcher Neil Z. Miller provides a history of the SIDS diagnosis, noting that the rise of SIDS coincided with the first mass immunization campaigns.

In the early 1960s, the number of vaccines administered to most U.S. infants took off. The federal government began appropriating money so the CDC could work with local health departments to vaccinate all children. The agency established the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes the recommendations for vaccines to be listed on the childhood immunization schedule.

By the end of the decade, most U.S. infants were receiving the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DPT), polio and measles vaccines, and mumps and rubella vaccines also became available.

As SIDS rates rose, so did parental concern that SIDS was connected to vaccination, but authorities assured parents that unexplained death following vaccination was “merely coincidental,” Miller wrote.

He also said that before 1979, the ICD included cause-of-death classifications associated with “prophylactic vaccination” as an official cause of death. As a result, “medical examiners are compelled to misclassify and conceal vaccine-related fatalities under alternate cause-of-death classifications.”

Instead of examining the link between vaccines and SIDS, public health researchers developed a “triple-risk model” for explaining SIDS. That model says SIDS occurs when a baby has an unknown medical condition, it is going through an important period of development where the body changes quickly, and it encounters an outside stressor, such as sleeping on its stomach.

Enter the ‘back to sleep’ campaign

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 1992 launched a national “Back to Sleep” campaign to inform parents to have children sleep on their backs rather than on their stomachs.

In 1994, the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development institutionalized the campaign within the agency, in partnership with organizations like the AAP, and later, companies including Johnson & Johnson and Gerber — both of which have been sued for poisoning children with their products.

NIH renamed the campaign “Safe to Sleep” in 2012.

Between 1992, when the program was started, and 2001, SIDS deaths reportedly declined a whopping 55% — a number touted in every article celebrating the program, making it appear that babies sleeping on their stomachs was the cause of SIDS, not vaccines.

However, at the same time deaths from SIDS decreased, the rate of mortality from “suffocation in bed,” “suffocation other,” “unknown and unspecified causes,” and “intent unknown” all increased significantly.

What had happened was that the classification system had changed. SIDS deaths were being reclassified by medical certifiers, usually coroners, as one of the other similar categories, Miller reported.

Research published in the journal Pediatrics — the flagship journal of the AAP — concluded that deaths previously certified as SIDs were simply being certified as other non-SIDS causes, such as suffocation, that were still essentially SIDS deaths.

That change in classification accounted for more than 90% of the drop in SIDS rates.

The Pediatrics paper showed there was no decline in overall postneonatal mortality, despite the program’s — and the AAP’s — claims to the contrary.

Others verified the Pediatrics paper’s findings, and the trend continued, as reported by multiple studies in top journals. Miller reported that, for example, “From 1999 through 2015, the U.S. SIDS rate declined 35.8 % while infant deaths due to accidental suffocation increased 183.8%.”

In 2020, infant deaths from Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) — an umbrella category that accounts for both SIDS and other unknown causes began to rise even higher, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics.

No codes for vaccine-related sudden deaths

Dr. Paul Thomas, pediatrician and author of “Vax Facts: What to Consider Before Vaccinating at All Ages & Stages of Life,” told The Defender in an interview last year that extensive evidence links SIDS to vaccination.

Thomas said that because there are no ICD codes for vaccination, the deaths are typically recorded as something else.

“When an infant dies, no matter how soon after vaccination, coroners and pathologists do not have any codes for vaccine-related death available as options, so these deaths are generally coded as SIDS, unknown, or suffocation.”

80% of infant deaths reported VAERS between 1990-2019 happened within 7 days of vaccination

Thomas said pediatricians are not educated about the link, so even when it clearly occurs, they don’t recognize it.

“I was taught that SIDS was due to parents smoking in the room, the room being too hot, babies co-sleeping or sleeping on surfaces that were too soft, or moms smothering their babies while nursing,” he wrote, sharing insights from his new book. “While all these factors may plausibly contribute, the primary cause has been right under our noses for decades. The vaccines!”

Miller’s analysis of sudden infant deaths in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) showed that nearly 80% of those deaths reported to the system between 1990 and 2019 happened within seven days of vaccination.

A recent peer-reviewed study found a positive statistical correlation between infant mortality rates and the number of vaccine doses received by babies — confirming findings made by the same researchers a decade ago.

The 2018 Health Affairs study reported that the bifurcation of the U.S. mortality rates from those of other wealthy countries began in the 1980s — the same time the country saw a major uptick in childhood vaccination.

A 2023 study published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science found that the developed nations requiring the most neonatal vaccine doses tend to have the worst childhood mortality rates.

The CDC currently recommends 76 doses of 18 different vaccines for children ages 0-18.

Child mortality researchers have also noted that sudden unexplained childhood deaths in children over 1 year old are often underestimated, and many such child deaths remain unexplained due to failure to understand or investigate causes.

A recent study in JAMA Pediatrics found that hospitalized preterm infants had a 170% higher incidence of apnea within 48 hours of receiving their routine 2-month vaccinations compared to unvaccinated babies, according to the data in a new study.

Higher infant mortality has also been linked to poor maternal health or other perinatal issues, including premature birth.