Infant vaccines are safe and don't cause SIDS (or non-existent VIDS) | Fact check

Nate Trela, USA TODAY
·6 min read

The claim: Vaccines cause SIDS, which should be called VIDS

A Dec. 12 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) includes a sketch of a woman cradling a baby. "Healthy babies don't just die," the post reads.

“Less than 1% of reactions are actually reported to VAERS,” the caption reads. ”VAERS isn’t taught in medical school, so most doctors aren’t even aware of it. Reactions are very rarely reported. They say reactions are rare, but that’s actually not the case. When reactions listed on an insert can lead to death it’s no coincidence. SIDS is VIDS.”

The post also asserts that 75% of SIDS deaths occur within a week of receiving a vaccination.

The post was liked more than 700 times in a week.

More from the USA TODAY Fact-Check Team:

Our rating: False

Multiple studies show no increased rates of SIDS among vaccinated infants, and one metanalysis found they are less likely to die of SIDS. VIDS is not a term used by medical professionals.

Years of studies underscore safety of vaccination

The term VIDS, used by anti-vaccine advocates claiming that vaccines are actually the cause of SIDS, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, has no basis in reality, experts told USA TODAY.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and Dr. Sean O’Leary, director of the Colorado Pediatric Practice-Based Research Network for Children's Hospital Colorado, both said they had never heard the term VIDS used by a medical professional. SIDS is a term applied to the sudden death of a baby under one year that has no determined cause, according to the Department of Health and Human Services

USA TODAY has previously reported on multiple research studies and safety reviews that have shown no causal link between vaccines and SIDS.

Among a collection of research on infant vaccination maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a paper that reviewed 26 years of Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System reports and found no new or unexpected safety issues or causal links between SIDS and vaccines.

Another paper looked directly at SIDS rates after DTaP vaccination in a population of more than 120,000 children over 11 years and found no increased risk of SIDS.

A meta-analysis looking broadly at SIDS risk across several years and multiple studies for all routine infant immunizations found the opposite of what the claim asserts – vaccinated infants had half the rate of SIDS as the unvaccinated.

Fact check: False claim Moderna admitted mRNA vaccines cause 'turbo-cancer'

Risk factors for SIDS include placing a child to sleep on its stomach, loose bedding, maternal drinking and smoking around an infant.

Post includes several unsubstantiated claims

The post makes additional claims about VAERS that are baseless or misleading, according to Offit and O’Leary.

First, the post claims that doctors do not learn about VAERS in medical school, implying that is a significant factor in underreporting of adverse events. VAERS collects unverified reports from anyone about symptoms they believe could be attributed to a vaccination, regardless of proof.

Neither Offit nor O’Leary could definitively point to research on instruction about VAERS in medical schools, either supporting or debunking the claim. O’Leary said instruction about VAERS could depend on the school, but pediatricians and primary care physicians generally know about the system.

Offit, who is also a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania, said he absolutely discusses VAERS with students. He also noted that gaps in awareness about VAERS closed since the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Because some of the vaccines took the novel approach of using mRNA to help generate an immune response, medical professionals became hypervigilant about tracking reported side effects, he said.

The post also made an unsubstantiated claim that less than 1% of adverse reactions are reported to VAERS, a figure both O’Leary and Offit doubted.

O’Leary said the reporting of suspected events to VAERS was likely much higher for serious side events than minor symptoms like a rash or soreness at an injection site.

John Su, a CDC medical officer, previously told USA TODAY that while a 1995 study found less than 1% of minor reactions were reported to passive reporting systems like VAERS, a 2001 study found as many as 76% of serious events were reported to VAERS.

Offit said that is in line with how VAERS should work, with more serious events getting reported and aggregated. VAERS is only one part of the system for tracking effects of vaccines, and no conclusions about causation can be drawn from it, he said.

“I would argue that VAERS is misnamed – it should be the Suspected Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, or SVAERS, because what is reported is not necessarily from a vaccine,” Offit said. “At best, it’s a hypothesis-generating system, like a complaints department at a department store.

Finally, the post also claims that 75% of SIDS deaths are reported within one week of vaccination, though once again it offers no evidence. Offit previously told USA TODAY that claims that the vast majority of SIDS deaths reported in VAERS happened near the date of a vaccination could be statistically accurate, but they lack significant context.

Offit, responding then to a claim that 98% of SIDS cases happen within 10 days of vaccination, said most SIDS deaths happen before 6 months, regardless of vaccination status. The infant immunization schedule is particularly active between 4 and 6 months, but that only shows a “temporal correlation, not a causal one.”

“It’s like the rooster crowed, and then the sun came up. That doesn’t mean the rooster made it happen,” he said, pointing again to the limits of working with VAERS data that collects voluntary reports from anybody of suspected adverse events.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the claim for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or e-newspaper here.

USA TODAY is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, which requires a demonstrated commitment to nonpartisanship, fairness and transparency. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Meta.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What causes SIDS? Not vaccines. Fact check on SIDS/VIDS viral rumor