Anti-Vax Grifts Amid Tragedy

In the 1970s, pediatrician Alfred Steinschneider became a world-renowned sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) researcher using the case of Waneta Hoyt, a woman from upstate New York whose five children died in their sleep.

In 1995, Hoyt was convicted of murdering her five children, introducing us to the concept of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, also known as “factitious disorder imposed on another,” which occurs when a caregiver creates the appearance of health problems in others in order to gain sympathy and attention for themselves.

In 1997, the book The Death of Innocents detailed how the children’s deaths had been used to establish a theory about babies dying in their sleep that misled medicine for 25 years. Whether Steinschneider was willfully blind to all of this wasn’t entirely clear, but there were reasons to believe he and Hoyt were operating in a coordinated manner at some level and possibly for illicit reasons.

Steinschneider had argued that SIDS could be predicted and prevented with the use of a new device called a home apnea monitor. This led to a multi-million dollar market for home apnea monitors.

His commercial angle was similar to the one Andrew Wakefield would attempt with a fraudulent vaccine scare in 1998, just after The Death of Innocents was published. Wakefield’s is an angle still being pushed by others for profit.

As if the 25-year rhyming book of history sensed we needed a new tragic grift involving little kids and another possible case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, we have a terrible hybrid of these two precedents — potential murders of children combined with vaccine misinformation.

It is one being shamelessly exploited by MAHA in a lawsuit against the AAP and championed by RFK, Jr.’s former organization, Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

The story involves Andrea Shaw, a 23-year-old mother in Payette, ID, who allegedly suffocated her twin toddlers in May 2025. After “a lengthy investigation conducted with assistance from several agencies, including Idaho State Police Forensic Services, the Ada County Coroner’s Office, the Boise Police Department, the Payette County Prosecutor’s Office and the Payette County Coroner’s Office,” she was arrested for murder on June 30, 2026. A grand jury indictment followed on July 2nd. Shaw is being held on a $2 million bond.

Days after her children’s deaths, Shaw appeared on a CHD podcast claiming vaccines were responsible.

Shaw was named the lead plaintiff in a January 2026 racketeering (RICO) lawsuit (Shaw v. American Academy of Pediatrics), which was announced breathlessly through multiple anti-vax outlets, including the “gaslight journal” Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law. This journal is funded by the, ahem, foundation run by Peter McCullough, a physician who lost his board certification in January 2025. Propagandist Nick Hulscher — an MPH gone bad — wrote it up.

• McCullough and Hulscher have earned reputations as two major grifters pushing unproven vaccine injury diagnoses and treatments.

Shaw was under investigation for murder at the time the lawsuit was filed, since foul play in the deaths of her twins was suspected from the start. But to those backing the RICO lawsuit, the investigation into two suspicious children’s deaths wasn’t an impediment. In fact, the lawsuit seeks to make the investigation part of the conspiracy theory behind the RICO lawsuit:

This criminal investigation is a foreseeable consequence of AAP’s fraudulent safety claims: when the medical system has been told that vaccines cannot cause serious injury or death, grieving parents become suspects rather than victims. Plaintiff Shaw’s injuries are the foreseeable and proximate result of AAP’s racketeering scheme. AAP’s categorical safety claims, disseminated through pediatricians and public-facing materials, induced Mrs. Shaw to consent to vaccination despite her expressed concerns about family history. Those same categorical claims now form the basis for criminal suspicion against her, as investigators assume vaccines could not have caused her children’s deaths. Mrs. Shaw’s injuries are continuing because AAP continues to disseminate the same false safety claims that induced her consent and that now imperil her liberty.

All of these mental gymnastics show the conspiracy theory test in action — you can tell something is a conspiracy theory when every element always returns you to the conspiracy theory. It’s a closed loop, with no evidentiary off-ramp.

What happens from here isn’t clear, but if the lead plaintiff in a RICO case turns out to have murdered the children allegedly injured by vaccines, this may go down in history as one of the more heartless frivolous lawsuits ever filed — which fits this gang’s MO perfectly.

And Shaw and her children will probably be swept under the proverbial rug when these tiresome CHD toads seek another angle to use to push their misinformation and undermine scientific and medical institutions.

It’s all so heartless and disgusting.

What a world.