Anti-Vax Grifts Amid Tragedy
The depths to which some anti-vax people will sink are simply godawful
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).