A CLAIM THAT children missing their scheduled vaccines during the pandemic led to a decrease in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has spread widely despite being factually untrue.

A post that has spread widely on social media reads: “Did you know during the lockdowns of 2020, millions of babies missed their ‘well baby checkups’. Which meant they didn’t get their scheduled vaccines.

“Did you know that same year, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome became nearly non-existent?”* 

One version of this quote was shared dozens of times since being posted by an Irish user on 10 October.

However, the quote appears to originate with an American anti-vaccine activist who goes by Conspirious Christine whose 6 October post with these words on Instagram has been viewed more than 794,100 times.

The quote about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) seems, like much of that user’s content, to be an attempt to paint vaccines as dangerous — in this case implying that they were killing children, which only came to light when vaccines were cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, sometimes called cot death, is the name given to the unexpected and unexplained death of children, generally under one year of age and usually while sleeping.

Ireland did see a modest decrease in vaccine uptake in children in the first year of the 2020 lockdowns, according to data made available by the HPSC.

However, the rate of SIDS deaths did not drop to non-existence as the posts imply. It didn’t drop at all.

The CSO provides extensive data on the number and causes of deaths in Ireland. This includes the number of SIDS deaths in a given year, broken down by sex, province and whether the child was older or younger than 4 months.

In 2019, the year before lockdowns, there were 12 cases of SIDS recorded by the CSO. In 2020, the number stayed the same – 12.

The data going back to 2010 shows a general decline in the annual cases of SIDS, though the annual figure generally remains in the teens.

Statistics from the CSO show that, in the last few decades, infant and maternal death rates in general have plunged significantly.

In the United States, there similarly does not appear to be any drop in the rate of SIDS, which in 2020 actually recorded a minor increase in such cases.

There have been multiple studies into vaccines and SIDS — no link has been shown.

Anti-vaccine rhetoric has ramped up online, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccines used to combat it.

This year has seen an anti-vaccine activist, Robert Kennedy Jr., appointed the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, as well as the White House spreading debunked myths that vaccines cause autism.

*(Some spelling and grammatical errors have been corrected).

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