In early September 2021, three-month-old baby Lucas went to sleep and never woke up. By all accounts, he was a healthy and thriving baby. His pediatrician had just seen him the day before and remarked, “I have no worries.”

So what happened? Why and how did this healthy baby die suddenly and unexpectedly?

SIDS One Day…After Shots

Lucas’ story was shared publicly on Facebook, and one detail about his story stuck out in particular: he died less than two days after receiving several vaccines.

Just 38 hours after a few shots–Lucas died suddenly and the coroner is calling it SIDS, pending the autopsy. There is only one other piece of the story, that he was with a sitter who placed him on his side, and his mother Hilliary speculates that he rolled over onto his belly and died because of this.

While prone sleeping position has long been associated with SIDS, and deaths that once would have been labeled SIDS are commonly now labeled “accidental suffocation”–the timing of this death so close to vaccination deserves a closer inspection.

I know what many of you may be thinking:

‘Don’t vaccines reduce the risk of SIDS?’ 

I want to be completely clear here: Studies that investigated the relationship between vaccines and SIDS never proved that vaccines actually reduce an infants risk of SIDS.

So what did the studies show?

Routine vaccinations were not shown to causally reduce an infant’s risk of SIDS–and the actual research is careful about their language so as not to insinuate there is a causal relationship (which an observational study cannot establish).

There is an association, however, which is easily explained by a healthy vaccinee effect, as is even mentioned in the conclusions of one often quoted meta-analysis. (A meta-analysis is a study that looks at a sample of other studies to estimate overall trends.)

What is healthy vaccinee effect?

Healthy vaccinee effect refers to a situation when patients, who are in better health, are more likely to be vaccinated, and those in poor health are less likely to be vaccinated.

The vaccines / SIDS case-control studies were done at a time when infants received the first recommended vaccine at 2 months of age, and so any death that occurred in an infant younger than 2 months was classified as ‘unvaccinated.’ A majority of the SIDS deaths classified as ‘unvaccinated’ were not even age-eligible for vaccination at the time of their death, so couldn’t have possibly reduced or prevented their death.

But these “unvaccinated SIDS deaths” tips the scale along with the ‘healthier living infants’ being vaccinated slightly more often (because they were healthier)–researchers dishonestly used this to misinterpret what the data actually showed quite clearly–simply a healthy vaccinee effect.

It’s a bias. And even worse–once sleeping environment was controlled for, the “protective effect” of vaccinations disappeared.

Think about it. There is no logical reason why vaccines would reduce the risk of an unknown, unexplained death. Vaccines are for very specific pathogens, which are not responsible or associated with SIDS. Otherwise it wouldn’t be SIDS, it would be a death from a vaccine-preventable infection.

Because the vaccine schedule has changed dramatically over the decades, including adding a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, the vast majority of infants who die of SIDS today are in fact vaccinated prior to death. Like Lucas.

SIDS or Vaccine Reaction?

Lucas’ mother Hilliary does not believe her son died from a vaccine reaction, because the coroner told her he did not. But how exactly would he know that (so quickly)? And what to him even constitutes a reaction? Only anaphylaxis?

Is that really the only possible reaction? No.

Here is a case report of a simultaneous SIDS death in twins. The 3.5 month old twin girls received vaccines and acetaminophen just prior to death:

“Two days prior to the incident, the twins had received the second dose of oral polio, DPT and the first dose of hepatitis B vaccines and they had fever on the first day of the vaccination and been given teaspoonful of acetaminophen.”

What are the odds of twins dying of SIDS shortly after vaccines and it not being related to the vaccines and/or Tylenol at all?

Or consider this 2006 case report by Ottaviani titled “Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) shortly after hexavalent vaccination: another pathology in suspected SIDS?”. Here, a 3 month old white female infant lost consciousness 1 hour after hexavalent vaccination. Emergency help was sought immediately, and despite resuscitation efforts and repeated administration of adrenaline and atropine, the baby died within 2 hours of hospital admission.

The author writes:

On one hand, the unexpected death of this vulnerable baby (infant with bilateral hypoplasia of the arcuate nucleus) could have been triggered by the hexavalent vaccination. This case is consistent with the triple-risk model of SIDS, a hypothesis comprising an underlying biological vulnerability to exogenous stressors and some triggering factors in a critical developmental period. On the other hand, this case could be classified as a SIDS “gray zone” or borderline case, defined as a case in which it is difficult to establish whether the pathological findings are sufficiently severe to have caused the death.

In conclusion, the careful examination of the heart, cardiac conduction system and brainstem on serial sections was crucial to classify this case as SIDS and to identify the possible morphological substrates responsible for this lethal reflexogenic sudden death, that is, arcuate nucleus hypo-plasia in the brainstem and persistent fetal dispersion and resorptive degeneration in the cardiac conduction system. All cases of sudden unexpected death occurring in infancy and perinatal age, especially soon after a vaccination, should always undergo an investigated necropsy study, according to our guidelines.

Accordingly, a SIDS death immediately after a vaccination, in which the vaccine is seen as an exogenous stressor, still qualifies as a SIDS death. Even if the stressor was identified as a contributing factor–wow.

Lucas died less than 2 days after a few vaccines which were injected directly into his body. He was fussy and thus was placed on his side to sleep, after which he potentially rolled over. While prone sleeping position has long been associated with SIDS, it’s not the cause.

Fussiness is an outward sign of inflammation and stress, and also may signify a systemic response to vaccination, which by design is meant to rev up the immune system’s inflammatory response.

An infant’s blood-brain barrier (a semi permeable membrane that keeps toxins out of the brain) is not fully mature until after 6 months of age, (SIDS peaks at 2-4 months of age and then drops substantially after 6 months) and even then it’s still a semi-permeable membrane which can be made more permeable in the presence of neurotoxins in vaccines like aluminum, and also during times of infection or inflammation–which vaccines simulate.

It’s not far fetched that SIDS is the fatal result of a vital part of the brain being damaged by a toxin mediated, cholinergic inflammatory response. A byproduct from having a not fully matured blood-brain barrier and then being exposed to multiple immune challenges–whether it is from pathogens, nicotine, vaccines, maternal SSRI use, acetaminophen, pesticide and insecticide exposure–or a combination of all these factors, as combining nicotine with other risk factors increases one’s risk.

Infants whose deaths are classified as SIDS have inflammatory scarring in regions of their brain that controls respiration and breathing-–the medulla oblongata–which also isn’t protected by the blood-brain barrier at all.

This has to stop now.

Lucas’ Story (in his mother’s words):

June 4th 2021, Lucas Daniel Caughhorn, came into this world. A very short 3 months later on September 9th, 2021 our sweet, happy, healthy little Lucas went to sleep and never woke up 😞

I was invited to be in my best friends wedding but it was an out of town wedding so for the very first time Lucas would have to go to a babysitter. We were nervous since we would be away from our kids for the very first time (they always go everywhere we go and I’m a stay at home mom) so we took Lucas to his pediatrician September 7th at 11am.

Her exact words “I have no worries” …

Our sweet baby boy was perfect 😍 he was healthy, he was gaining weight and growing like a weed!

September 7th at 2:30pm we dropped our little man off at the babysitters house and hit the road to start our 17 hour car ride. Multiple times a day we would check in to see how our little man was doing since it was our first time away from him.

September 8th Lucas babysitter put him to sleep. Sometime around midnight Lucas woke up to eat, the babysitter fed him and spent some time with him but Lucas was fussier then normal, due to some shots he got at the doctors on September 7th, so she decided to move him and she placed Lucas on his side rather then back since it seemed to help his fussiness 😞

Sometime between midnight and 5am Lucas rolled over in his sleep…

Around 5am September 9th the babysitter found Lucas and called 9-1-1. CPR was started instantly until paramedics arrived but there was nothing anyone could do, our Lucas had been gone for hours before he was found.

As mentioned above, we would check in with the babysitter multiple times a day to make sure everything was fine, but September 9th was different! … the baby sitter wouldn’t answer me when I asked how Lucas was doing. In fact, no one in our family would answer us so we became very very worried but we kept saying “surly if something was wrong they would of called us ASAP”

We later found out our parents made the choice to notify us rather then having police do it so our parents jumped on the next flight to myrtle beach and the babysitter was told to not answer us until we got notified.

Around 6:50pm that night my mom called to tell us to come back to our hotel.

7pm we received every parents worst nightmare, our baby boy had fallen asleep and never woke up💔😞

Like so many parents SIDS/SUID was always a huge fear but never in a million years did we ever think it would happen to us! We Followed all the current Recommendations for sleep safety! but we learned the hard way that some people still followed the older recommendations, the same recommendations many of our parents and grandparents were told was safe back when they had babies.

In fact a study conducted from 2009-2015 showed 21.6% of respondents admitted to NOT following recommendations by the CDC for infant sleep safety.

Resource – will be posted in comment section for reference

3,500 babies a year pass away from SIDS/SUID !! 3,500 babies go to sleep every year and never wake up 💔

September 14th, the day before our sons funeral was when we were told by the corners office that ours sons SIDS/SUID case was caused by him rolling over.

September 15th with many family and friends by our sides we said our finally goodbyes to our babyboy.

Today is October 1st, SIDS awareness month, but it’s also the day we received Lucas’ urn 🙏🏽❤️ so our baby boy can finally come home ❤️

Our goal with starting The Lucas Project Foundation is to educate! Nothing we ever do will bring our little Lucas back, but what we can do is take his story and educate as many people as we can with the hopes to lower the number of babies that are passing away from SIDS/SUID.

We want family and friends to remember Lucas for the huge impact he made in this world! The way he would look at me 😍 with pure love in his eyes!

His chunky self, his huge smile, how much he loved when people would talk and play with him ❤️

Lucas isn’t a static! He isn’t just 1 of 3,500 babies a year that went to sleep and never woke up

He is a brother

A son

A grandson

A nephew

A cousin

But most amazing of all he is a light in this life! And with his light shinning bright to guide us we will do everything in our power to make sure we use that bright light to guide and educate other’s who come across his story.