In late April, a fully vaccinated 8-year-old Indiana boy tragically died from a bacterial infection that spread to his brain, causing meningitis. Despite being fully vaccinated against Hib or haemophilus influenzae type b, allegedly the doctors at the hospital told mother Ashlee Dahlberg that her son Liam “likely caught the bacteria from an unvaccinated child at school.”

The truth I wish the doctors imparted is that nearly everyone carries one of the many serotypes of haemophilus influenzae in their nose and throat at any given time. It’s a commensal bacteria; a common colonizer of the upper respiratory tract. Liam’s mother, father and his siblings all may have been carrying the same exact bacteria in their nose and throat and not know it.

Instead, Dahlberg wrote a hate-filled rant blaming ‘unvaccinated children’ for her child’s death, a post she has since deleted due to getting so much flack. Dahlberg has a GoFundMe which has raised over $56,000. She interviewed with a local Indiana news station before getting her story picked up mainstream news from People to Daily Mail.

But when she started an online Change.org petition to remove Religious Exemptions I realized that’s when we have to share what we know, set the record straight and share all the receipts of this conflicting and contradictory timeline surrounding what happened to Liam, whose death is now being weaponized for mandatory vaccination, even though vaccines literally failed to protect this young boy.

The story keeps changing

Dahlberg first stated her son was immune compromised in her Facebook post pictured above. In the pic below, she reiterates he is immune compromised.

Dahlberg also revealed in the comments section of the now deleted April 28 post that Liam died from a strain of haemophilus influenzae not covered by the vaccine. This means the vaccine is not capable of preventing the specific infection, as the bacteria and vaccine are a mismatch. So again, it throws out the whole argument that an unvaccinated child is to blame if the serotype Liam had was not targeted by the vaccine.

Now nearly a month later, Dahlberg announced “after taking a deep dive into his medical records it was discovered he was in fact NOT immune compromised like we originally thought.” She also provides new information that the bacteria he contracted and died from is type B, but not any medical records or proof. But if that’s true, that means that the vaccine failed to prevent the deadly outcome it was ‘designed’ to prevent. She could raise awareness about vaccine failure, but doesn’t.

According to his mom, Liam had asthma, a known side effect of vaccination according to a 2023 CDC published study that found a dose response relationship between the aluminum adjuvant in vaccines and rate of asthma. She explains below that Liam was on medication for asthma she was “told he had a compromised immune system.” [Again, it can’t ever be that the vaccines failed right? It has to be a failure of the child or some other unvaccinated child.]

But she still believes that while the Hib vaccine obviously failed to prevent infection and invasive hib in her son, vaccines would have been successful in other children, preventing both transmission and carriage. If the vaccine failed to prevent infection and invasive disease in Liam, why would it “work” in other children?

A Petition to Remove Religious Exemptions

As the details surrounding Liam’s sudden illness keep changing, Dahlberg has started an online petition to remove Religious Exemptions. Rather than attributing blame to vaccine failure, she blames a gap in herd immunity, even though a gap in herd immunity doesn’t explain why a fully vaccinated immune competent child died of the very disease he was vaccinated against.

She also continues to blame unvaccinated individuals for her son’s death, even though he was vaccinated and the vaccine failed to protect him. If the vaccines can’t even prevent the most serious fatal outcome in Liam, what makes her think it would prevent carriage in others?

Herd immunity comes from natural carriage as well. Vaccines do not protect others from severe disease. Vaccines are supposed to prevent severe disease in the vaccinated individual, but in this case did not. So where is the argument for mass vaccination when vaccines fail to prevent severe disease in both the individual and in others?

How can anyone say—let alone a parent who just lost their fully vaccinated child to a “vaccine preventable illness”—that ‘vaccines save lives‘? I suspect she did not write this change.org statement by herself:

This has nothing to do with herd immunity. This has nothing to do with unvaccinated students or the religiously exempt. This has everything to do with vaccine failure.

Ashlee Dahlberg’s son Liam was fully vaccinated against Hib, or haemophilus influenzae type B, but as it turns out, Liam either contracted a strain of haemophilus influenzae not protected by the only available vaccine, or if it was type B, which is highly unlikely, the vaccine failed to prevent invasive hib, which is literally its only job.

It’s highly unlikely that Liam actually died of type B. According to the CDC, most cases of invasive Hib in this country are non-typable serotypes.

Hib Meningitis

According to the CDC, “H. influenzae are bacteria that live in people’s nose and throat. Usually, these bacteria cause no harm. However, they can move to other parts of the body and cause infection.”

Approximately 20% of infants are colonized in the first year of life and this rises progressively over time.

Hib carrier state increased from 4% to 47.5% in children attending day care for longer than 6 months.

By the age of 5–6 years more than 50%-75% of children will be colonized with this bacterium and most healthy adults (at least 75 %) will be.

A 2022 study examined the carriage of healthy children in Portugal, and found that 84% of the children sampled had at least one strain of H. influenzae in their upper respiratory tract.

There are encapsulated and non typable unencapsulated bacteria.

There are six encapsulated serotypes: a, b, c, d, e, and f. 

The Hib vaccine targets only one strain: strain b. Carriage of Hib type B has gone down since the widespread use of the vaccine, but the vaccine causes mutations and selection pressure, and we now have more non-typable carriage and invasive disease as a result.

A 2025 Danish paper (Epidemiology of invasive Haemophilus influenzae infections in Belgium: 2018–2022) examined invasive Hib serotypes and found that 78% of invasive Hib in 5-19 year olds were non-typable isolates, whereas only 8.7% were type B, the type “prevented” by the vaccine.

Hours of hallucinations?

What’s even more gut wrenching is that Liam suffered an entire night of high fevers and hallucinations before he was brought to the ER the next day. Most of the news articles say the child died just hours after first symptoms. But Liam came home from school with a bad headache Thursday, which became excruciating sometime that afternoon, followed by hours of hallucinations and high fevers, and he was not bought to the ER until Friday morning. His mother kept administering Motrin to lower the fever and try to get her son to ‘calm down’ but it appears he needed urgent medical attention instead. Fevers would have been the body’s way of killing the bacteria, and thus reducing the fever enables the bacteria to continue unabated.

If the mother truly wanted to sound the alarm, let’s sound it on recognizing the signs of meningitis and seeking immediate medical attention.

I feel very sorry for this mom, and have empathy for this tragic situation, but blaming innocent children and classmates of Liam, or any other child or person is a distraction from what really happened. It’s a distraction from the inefficacy of vaccines. It’s a distraction from the larger more unsettling issue that a fully vaccinated child died from a serious infection that was supposedly preventable by the vaccines he received earlier in his life.

What good are vaccines if at the end of the day they don’t save your life from the very serious infection they target?

Signs and Symptoms of Meningitis

There are many kinds of meningitis: bacterial, viral, fungal, parasitic, even drug induced. They all may present slightly differently, but many have overlapping similarities.

Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) seroprevalence and current epidemiology in England and Wales  doi: 10.1016/j.jinf.2017.12.010. Epub 2017 Dec 28.

During 2012-2016, annual Hib disease incidence remained below one case per million population, responsible for only 67 of 3523 laboratory-confirmed H. influenzae cases, including one case of Hib meningitis during the 5-year period.

Hib antibodies wane rapidly after the 12 months booster. Although most children remain protected against disease, antibody levels may not be high enough to prevent carriage among toddlers. 

Haemophilus influenzae type b meningitis in a vaccinated and immunocompetent child. doi: 10.1016/j.jiph.2016.06.001. Epub 2016 Jul 12.

“We report a case of a fifteen-months-old girl, previously healthy and vaccinated, admitted in the emergency room with fever and vomiting. She was irritable and the Brudzinski’s sign was positive. The cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis showed pleocytosis and high protein level. Empiric intravenous antibiotics (ceftriaxone and vancomycin) were administered for suspected bacterial meningitis during 10 days. Serotyping of the Haemophilus influenzae strain found in CSF revealed a serotype b. Despite vaccination compliance and absence of risk factors, invasive Hib disease can occur due to vaccine failure.” 

Ten years of Hib vaccination in Italy: prevalence of non-encapsulated Haemophilus influenzae among invasive isolates and the possible impact on antibiotic resistance. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2011.03.059. Epub 2011 Apr 1.

The introduction of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) conjugate vaccines has greatly reduced the incidence of invasive Hib disease. However, concern exists about the possible emergence of “strain replacement”.

Nonencapsulated (ncHi) predominated among H. influenzae isolates from all age groups: 61.5%, 76.0%, and 75.0% for <5, 5-64 and ≥65 years, respectively.