Elon Musk’s First Son Died of SIDS–Or Was It The 2 Month Shots?
Elon Musk made headlines once again, this time for a tweet made on November 20th, where he claimed that his firstborn child died in his arms, and he felt his last heartbeat–a memory which was then disputed by his ex-wife Canadian author Justine Musk a few days later.
While so many news articles focused on the public squabble–I’m going to bring up the elephant in the room: Vaccines.
Baby Nevada was 10 weeks old when he was found not breathing while sleeping safely on his back–was he recently vaccinated??
Honestly, could it have been the vaccines??
According to the 2002 CDC pediatric vaccine schedule, a 2 month old baby would have been given five injections: Hepatitis B vaccine, a DTaP vaccine (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis in one), a Hib vaccine (haemophilus influenzae), an IPV vaccine (inactivated polio) and a PCV vaccine (pneumococcal). Today, a baby would get even more vaccines (for example, a Rotavirus vaccine).
If baby Nevada got every recommended shot (delaying or modifying the CDC vaccine schedule is highly frowned upon), he would have had five separate injections into his little thighs. Considering the average 2 month old full term baby weighs about 11 pounds, 4 ounces–that’s a lot of vaccines for a human that weighs less than 12 pounds. Most adults don’t get any where near that many vaccines on one day!
Routine 2 Month Shots in 2002:
-
- Hepatitis B vaccine
- DTaP vaccine
- Hib vaccine
- Polio (IPV) vaccine
- Pneumococcal (PCV) vaccine
It’s highly unlikely and unbelievable that all these injections would have no effect on infants, when the purpose of them is to have an effect. And we can’t control everything. Reactions do happen.
Can vaccines cause death? Yes, they can…and they do. That’s why we have a Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The issue is: can a parent (and their team of experts) prove it? Especially when the diagnosis is the unknown, umbrella diagnosis: SIDS.
Could Nevada have experienced an adverse reaction to those shots that made him stop breathing?
I recently interviewed mom Rebecca Crane, a mother whose 4 month old baby girl Skylar stopped breathing during a daytime nap 3 days after the 4 month shots. She was found blue by the sitter. Baby Skylar survived the horrific event, but did go on to have months of seizure activity. She has since fully recovered from her vaccine injury and Rebecca won her petition with the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
Rebecca told me had her daughter not been found and revived when she was–her death would have been labeled a SIDS death. You can listen to the interview here. My podcast “We Are Science Experiments” is available where all podcasts are.
But it begs the question, how often are post-vaccine reactions not appropriately recognized, and even mislabeled SIDS?
In a Marie Claire article, Justine Musk made it clear she followed other health advice, such as placing Nevada ‘down for a nap placed on his back as always’. It suggests she was a rule follower, and took all the precautions to avoid SIDS, as so many other parents do:
Not only does Nevada’s untimely death not fit with the typical seasonality of SIDS (Born on May 18, 2002, Nevada would have died some time in July) which has a seasonal distribution that is higher in the winter months (coincides with seasonal infections and over-wrapping and overheating) and lower in the summer months (Summer time SIDS clusters are an especially unusual anomaly)–but Nevada had very few, if any, of the classical SIDS risk factors. Yet, Nevada still died SIDS.
SIDS Is Not Clearly Defined
It’s baffling to me how many healthy babies die suddenly and get the SIDS label, but don’t have the classic risk factors long associated with SIDS. It’s even more baffling that the majority of the supposed “risk factors” for SIDS, are really just associated with a higher infant mortality overall, and not even particular to SIDS.
For example:
- Black infants are twice as likely to die (of all causes) as white infants during their first year of life (10.8 vs 4.6 per 1000 live births).
- Preterm infants have a much higher infant mortality rate (IMR) than full term infants, and the rate goes up the more premature an infant is.
- Artificial infant formula feeding has been associated with a higher infant mortality rate since the early 1900s. One hundred years later, breastfeeding is still associated with a lower overall infant mortality rate in the United States. You can make the best artificial formula in the world, and it’s still associated with a higher IMR than breastfeeding.
- Maternal smoking is associated with a higher infant mortality rate in a dose dependent manner.
- A 2016 study of Ethiopian children found that male gender, multiple birth, preterm, and rural residents were found to be statistically significantly associated with infant mortality.
- Could circumcision be one of the reasons that males have a higher overall mortality rate than females?
- This 2019 paper found a positive correlation between male circumcision and SIDS (Increase of 0.06 (95% CI: 0.01-0.1, t = 2.86, p = 0.01) per 1000 SIDS mortality per 10% increase in circumcision rate.)
It makes you wonder: how reliable are the epidemiological studies that detected these same risk factors for SIDS? Are any of them specific to SIDS? Really only one is: Sleeping.
SIDS is not a clearly defined disease–in fact, it’s the opposite! It’s a label for an unidentified, unknown cause of death that occurs most often during a sleep period, a diagnosis of exclusion. There is no positive diagnostic criteria. Rather, determining whether to attribute a death to SIDS or Unknown or Suffocation is incredibly subjective, and has changed over time.
In the 1970s and 1980s after the SIDS ICD code was created, many deaths were attributed to SIDS. These same deaths would just a decade later be labeled as suffocation, when SIDS definition got an update in 1991, which added the language: ‘death scene investigation.’ SIDS deaths went down after that, but suffocation deaths went up.
Risk Factors for SIDS
Over time, through epidemiological studies, questionnaires gathered demographic characteristics from families who lost an infant to SIDS, compared to families in the same or similar community whose infant was living. When more of the “case” infants were found to be…say… male or black or preterm or found on their belly, these then became “risk factors.”
You can take a sampling of families from any given location or time and may come up with a different set of risk factors, because it’s always in comparison to a group of living infants at that moment, and it’s always relative. Back in the 1950s and 1960s it was very common to place an infant on their belly to sleep, in fact it was the advice to prevent choking. Today, we have many more infants sleeping on their back, but these infants can and could still die of SIDS. And they do, for example Nevada was on his back.
Risk factors for SIDS gathered over the years (but are also associated with higher overall infant mortality in general)
- Premature / Low Birth Weight
- Twins (who are also often premature and low birth weight)
- Male
- 2-4 months of age
- Winter months
- Recent illness (upper respiratory infection)
- Black (African American), Alaskan Native, Indigenous ethnicity
- Prone sleeping position (on stomach)
- Unsafe sleeping environment (pillows, blankets, sofa, co-sleeping with intoxicated parent)
- Maternal smoking during and after pregnancy
- Formula feeding
- Younger mother (<20 years of age)
- Overcrowded living conditions
- Low socioeconomic status
- Unemployed parent
- Single mother
- Prenatal illegal drug use
Even more confusing, it’s fully possible that a full term female infant who is fully breastfeed, and placed on her back to sleep in a safe sleeping environment, dies of SIDS.
Therefore, while the risk factors may help identify at risk infants in general, they don’t provide any context for understanding what causes death. Especially, in the context when an infant without these risk factors, dies in the same, unexpected manner. At that point, we have to ask: Was the baby recently vaccinated?
Because when we paint SIDS historically as one thing, and then have these exceptions to the rule, these anomalies of sudden infant death that occur shortly after vaccination, it must create a question:
Are these higher numbers of deaths of infants in socially deprived homes or in dangerous sleeping conditions masquerading an effect of vaccines on otherwise healthy infants?
Could that be one reason why despite so many modifications to the child rearing practice, the overall SUID mortality rate has not dropped in 25 years?
But…Don’t Vaccines “Reduce” The Risk of SIDS?
It’s astonishing that several case control studies concluded that vaccines may even ‘reduce the risk’ of SIDS, based on the simple data point that they were able to come up with a group of SIDS infants, and a group of “control” infants (who were of course healthier, fuller term, had parents who followed infant health recommendations) and found that (no surprise) more of the control infants had begun vaccination compared to the SIDS infants. This alone is how they then concluded that ‘vaccines reduce the risk of SIDS.’
The study didn’t prove that vaccines actually reduce an infant’s risk of SIDS, because the controls in the study were not genuinely at risk of SIDS. Because we don’t understand the mechanism behind what causes death to infants who are labeled SIDS, we don’t know who is at risk. For the simple fact that we know vaccines don’t kill 100% of infants, there are obviously the majority of infants who can and are able to survive vaccination. It does not mean that we have proven vaccinations are not associated with any infants death.
Are black, low socioeconomic, premature, low birth weight, twin infants at more risk of SIDS than the general population? Then a case control should aim to identify those at risk infants, and be sure to include them in the study as a control. However, these studies don’t do that. Their control infants are notoriously healthier, fuller term, and not representational of any of the risk factors identified thus far. So we are comparing the immunization uptake of a group of sick infants with parents who fail to heed practical caregiving advice, to a group of healthier infants with parents who do follow practical caregiving advice. We will learn nothing about the exposure of vaccines and how it affects vulnerable groups designing studies this way.
- Never mind that at least half of the SIDS infants in any given study died too young to be immunized.
- Never mind that their parents were more likely to place them to sleep in a prone sleeping position.
- Never mind that a higher percent of SIDS infants were ‘unwell’ prior to death, which both provides context for delayed immunization and offers a clue into an immune-mediated mechanism for SIDS.
- Never mind that it’s a completely expected finding that SIDS parents (overall) would be less likely to immunize their infants, given that they also didn’t practice safe sleep advice, didn’t limit smoke exposure, didn’t breastfeed as often, and were more likely to use illegal drugs, have a previous infant loss, and be a young, single mother below the age of 18.
Importantly, these studies didn’t adjust for sleeping position. When and if they did adjust for sleeping position, the vaccine coverage was the same between SIDS and controls, and the supposed protection of vaccines became “non-significant.”
Not only that, but proper matching of SIDS infants and controls produced a positive association between SIDS and vaccines during the second month of life, which is historically the peak age for SIDS. Authors missed it, not surprised.
If baby Nevada was vaccinated prior to death, it’s impossible to say those vaccinations played no role in his death, either through elicitation of a seizure, or some other mechanism, perhaps immune mediated, such as cytokine production, or a cholinergic crisis that occurred during REM sleep.
If he was not vaccinated at all prior to death, then my next question would be (and I am not placing blame on the mother) was she taking any medications?
I have a hunch that most SIDS events are a result of a ‘cholinergic crisis.’ Various medications increase an infant’s risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, for example anti-depressants. These same medications have been shown to inhibit acetylcholinesterase, thereby increasing acetylcholine. During REM sleep, acetylcholine levels are at their highest in the human body.
Acetylcholine (ACh) is a chemical messenger, or neurotransmitter, at the neuromuscular junctions. It’s responsible for the sleep paralysis that accompanies REM sleep. Typically, the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is what breaks down acetylcholine. If AChE is inhibited for some reason, such as has been observed with antidepressants (SSRI), antihistamines such as benadryl, even other medications, or pesticides such as organophosphates, it results in excess or accumulation of acetylcholine, which can result in respiratory depression, seizures and death.
I believe this is the actual cause for SIDS, and why it occurs during sleep. This also explains why it’s more common in the prone position (increased risk of asphyxia during cholinergic crisis), and in nicotine exposed infants (nicotine binds with ACh receptors thereby causing an accumulation of ACh), and in some infants in the post-vaccination period. Vaccination induces prolonged sleep, increased REM, and the immune response to vaccination may cause alterations or lesions in the brain reducing the number of available ACh receptors. Aluminum, a common adjuvant used in many vaccines has been shown to inhibit AChE. Scientists have shown that the aluminum salts from vaccines can enter the brain via the lymphatic system. Getting sufficient sleep after vaccination results in a higher antibody response to the vaccine(s). SIDS occurs during sleep when the immune system is much more active.
Additionally, more medications are typically administered to infants before and after vaccinations, so these various mechanisms could be working synergistically to create a fatal cascade that an infant cannot recover from.
It also explains why it’s less common in breastfed infants (wake more often), and why it’s more common during the ages of vaccination peaking at age 2 months, but also why it still can occasionally occur at other ages.
Many reports of sudden death include that the child had diarrhea or was a little sick before death. An excess of ACh causes symptoms that mimic a mild viral infection, such as diarrhea, and other symptoms mimic typical baby stuff: increased salivation, tearing, crying, fussiness. Some reports describe that the baby cried and was very fussy and wouldn’t go to sleep, then finally went to sleep, and when the parent went to check on them, they were cold.
I believe these infants are experiencing a cholinergic crisis. At the ER, physicians administer atropine to infants who are brought in not breathing, which is an anticholinergic medication. It is given for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. But atropine is an antimuscarinic, not an antinicotinic. So it doesn’t work for infants in these contexts. But there could be something that does.
Whatever is the cause of SIDS has to account for both vaccinated and unvaccinated, female and male, prone and supine, smoking and non-smoking, premature and full term infants, sick and well, black and white. This does that: SIDS infants die as a result of a cholinergic crisis.
A recent study came out further confirming this theory. Infants who went on to die of SIDS had reduced Butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) detected in a blood spot at birth. Butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) is an enzyme similar to acetylcholinesterase (AChE) in that it also can hydrolyze ACh though not as effectively. The study found “there was strong evidence that lower BChE specific activity (BChEsa) was associated with death.”
This study doesn’t absolve vaccines, or any other mechanism that is associated with lower AChE activity or excess ACh. It actually adds further evidence to support it. However, I don’t know if the study controlled for medications and vaccines that lower BChE and are also associated with death, such as antidepressants. In that case, it’s telling us what we already know. There are drugs and medications that lower BChE and are ALSO associated with death.
To read more about SIDS, please visit the SIDS page.
SOURCES
Copper, aluminum, iron and calcium inhibit human acetylcholinesterase in vitro
Biopersistence and Brain Translocation of Aluminum Adjuvants of Vaccines
Antidepressants inhibit human acetylcholinesterase and butyrylcholinesterase activity
Basal forebrain acetylcholine release during REM sleep is significantly greater than during waking
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Altered Aminergic-Cholinergic Synaptic Markers in Hypothalamus
Witnessed sleep-related seizure and sudden unexpected death in infancy: a case report
Butyrylcholinesterase is a potential biomarker for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
