Mom Who Claimed Vaccines Killed Her Kids Has Been Charged With Their Murder
Medical experts determined that the children had been suffocated.
For the last year or so, Idaho mom Andrea Shaw has been making the rounds on the anti-vax circuit, telling anyone who will listen that her twin children, Dallas and Tyler, died of “vaccine injuries” after being given the hepatitis A, flu, and DTAP vaccines. She’s even the lead plaintiff in the RFK Jr.-founded Children’s Health Defense’s RICO lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics “for its central role in an enterprise that has defrauded American families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule for several decades.”
Yes, they are accusing the AAP of racketeering — of purposely not telling parents that vaccines are dangerous, in order to sell more vaccines. Certainly a strange choice given that doctors frequently lose money on vaccines rather than make money on them, but sure.
Last week, however, following a year-long investigation, Shaw was arrested on suspicion of having actually murdered her two children, and this past weekend, she was formally charged with their first degree — meaning it was planned — murder. Police say that the 23-year-old mother suffocated the 18-month-old twins herself, although not much further information has been released.
According to Shaw, she brought her twins in for the vaccine and told the doctor that the father’s whole family was “allergic” to the flu vaccine and thus usually takes the nasal spray version of it instead. Given that there are only about one or two allergic reactions to the flu shot for every million doses, this does seem somewhat unlikely. The doctor, however, told her that it was fine for the kids to get them, despite this. And it was, actually — adverse reactions tend to be idiosyncratic to an individual and are not typically inherited, so family history is not considered to be a contraindication.
The next day, Shaw brought the kids to the emergency room with “severe symptoms including blue lips, lethargy, and sunken eyes. The treating emergency room physician documented the diagnosis as ‘post-immunization reaction, initial encounter.’” Of these symptoms, only lethargy is a known side-effect of the flu vaccine.
A few days later, Shaw called in wanting to bring them in again, but was told they didn’t have time for walk-ins, particularly since the only symptom the children had left was diarrhea, assuring her that as long as the lethargy and dehydration didn’t return, that they would be okay.
It is worth noting here that a post-immunization reaction typically lasts between 24 and 48 hours.
Eight days later, Shaw said she woke up to find both twins dead, cold and “in their sleeping positions,” and immediately ran to her living room to call 911. Following that, the police soon began investigating Shaw and her husband for potentially having killed the children, and Shaw started on her anti-vax journey.
Now, while I certainly don’t believe it was the vax what done it, I do think it’s also pretty important to be skeptical of these kinds of cases from the other end as well. The thing is, it’s not actually that easy for doctors to determine that a child was suffocated on purpose. There have been a lot of cases in which parents or caretakers were charged or even convicted of the murder of young children, only for it to be discovered later that they died from other causes. Back in the 1990s, in the UK, a woman named Sally Clark was wrongfully convicted of murdering her two sons, after they both died under similar-seeming circumstances two years apart. She spent three years in prison before it was revealed that the second son, Harry, had actually died from a staphylococcus aureus infection (which the prosecution’s pathologist actually knew about the whole time). Kathleen Folbigg, of Australia, was wrongfully convicted of killing her four children, until it turned out they all had a genetic anomaly.
On the other hand, the odds of twins dying at the exact same time, even if they were both sick with the same thing, is practically nil. I was able to find a few cases of infant twins dying within 24-hours of one another, but no cases of toddlers doing so.
One thing that should perhaps be more of interest, I think, is that, during her appearance on the Children’s Health Defense podcast, Shaw explained that the people working in the NICU told her to let the twins sleep together until they couldn’t do that anymore on account of being opposite genders.
“That was something that the the NICU had told us,” Shaw explained, “That there it's not really a conspiracy or a medical reasoning, but when twins sleep together, say one's sick and the other isn't, it's almost like they their bond heals each other. So they said really up until we can't have them in the same bed anymore because they're opposite gender that it's best to keep them in the same bed to keep that bond.”
While there are certainly a lot of parents who do this, the American Academy of Pediatrics — the same organization that CHD filed suit against on her behalf — says that doing this increases the risk of suffocation or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Now, once children are older than 1 year, it would no longer qualify as SIDS, but there is even more of a risk, because by 18 months, they’re much more mobile, more likely to roll over and thus more prone to suffocate one another. (How they could do this simultaneously is its own question.) Now, I’m not saying that’s what happened either, but it seems like something worthy of consideration.
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Children’s Health Defense is, of course, still on the case and presenting Shaw’s situation as just another reason not to get one’s kids vaccinated — because if the vaccines kill the children, they could be sent to prison for their murder.
Shaw’s bail is set at $2 million, and if she is released, she will be barred from contact with anyone under the age of 18, including the new child she gave birth to recently.
Whatever way you shake this, it’s a truly sickening tragedy. If Shaw is guilty, the fact that she is going around trying to exploit her children’s deaths for personal gain and using the anti-vaccine movement as a cover for her crime is horrifying. If she’s innocent, then she’s a young woman who is being wrongfully charged with murder and exploited and taken advantage of by Children’s Health Defense. And regardless of her guilt or innocence, the fact remains that two 18-month-old children have died and are not coming back, and that’s the worst of all.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"including the new child she gave birth to recently." I KNEW that was coming.
.... well shit. That's enough Internet for today and it's only 9AM. Hope all of you have a better day than reading this made my morning. (And get your shots.)