Justice for Thalia Vida Gardner: Father Arrested

In March of 2015, I came across a series of Facebook posts from the family of a beautiful black-eyed baby girl named Thalia Vida Gardner. Her parents claimed that she had died unexpectedly after a serious adverse reaction to vaccines. They were, via GoFundMe, requesting thousands of dollars to "prove" that her death was a vaccine reaction.

It didn't take me long to find evidence calling those claims into question-- most notably, posts from concerned members of Thalia's family, who pointed out that her diagnosis at her time of death was traumatic brain injury, and that she had opiates in her system.

The entire tragic story is chronicled on the following posts:

Did Vaccines Really Kill Her?
12 Questions About Thalia Vida Gardner's Death
An Open Letter to Karla Gardner
Updates on Thalia Vida Gardner

In the long months that have passed since then, I have not had much of a break from this story. I've been badgered and berated by people asking me why there was no arrest, since many internet users don't seem to understand that an investigation like this can take months or years. Thalia's paternal grandmother has emailed me about once a month, telling me that her son isn't in jail and demanding that I remove screencaps from my blog. Jaci Rizzo-- the grandmother-- has even emailed my friends and relatives demanding that they somehow force me to remove blog posts that speak poorly of her son.

Most painfully, Thalia's story has led to many people personally attacking me and my integrity. Several commenters on previous articles accused me of completely fabricating Thalia's entire story for the purpose of driving traffic to my blog, and a now-widely-circulated "Open Letter to Juniper Russo" claimed that I was being well-paid by pharmaceutical companies to attack a grieving family.

I did none of those things. I have never profited in any way from Thalia's death and have no allegiance to anyone-- or anything-- besides justice. My motive has been, since day one, to see justice served, and to see other innocent children spared painful and horrific deaths.

Until now, I had no answer when people asked me why there was no arrest yet. I am not judge, jury, or law enforcement-- I'm only a concerned citizen who saw vaccines being blamed for what appeared to be a death caused by child abuse. Now, I finally have an answer.

On July 14, 2016, Thalia Vida Gardner's father, Tyler Justin Gardner, was arrested. He was specifically charged with child abuse and neglect with substantial bodily or mental harm-- a felony charge that, in his jurisdiction, carries a sentence of 6-15 years in prison. He is being held on $80,000 bail.

Tyler hasn't been convicted yet and is legally considered innocent until proven guilty. However, if 16 months of thorough investigation revealed child abuse-- rather than a vaccine injury-- I think it's at least safe to say that Thalia's death was not vaccine-related.

I will update readers if and when there is a conviction. In the mean time, I ask that followers stop harassing me and my family, and that everyone keep those who loved Thalia in their thoughts and prayers.

Jeff Bradstreet Abuses Children, Commits Suicide

I normally have deep sympathy for suicide victims, but there are rare exceptions. For example, I wasn't sad when Ariel Castro offed himself, and I'm not particularly sad that Jeff Bradstreet-- a child-abusing quack who endangered dozens of kids' lives with his "alternative" treatments-- is dead.

Bradstreet was an example of a truly vile and disgusting human being who put his goal of profit far ahead of his oath to protect his patients.

He became famous when he published a series of studies, none of which made the cut for peer-reviewed scientific journals, stating that thimerosal-- a mercury compound once used as a preservative in vaccines-- is the sole cause of autism. I don't even need to cite studies to debunk his claims, since autism rates have continued to rise since thimerosal was removed from routine immunizations, and since my own daughter was autistic before she was ever vaccinated. But, for the record, 131 studies- 107 of them listed here-- have found no link between vaccines and autism.

Bradstreet's practices went far beyond simply encouraging parents to avoid vaccines, although that would be dangerous enough. He subjected children to painful and dangerous procedures that were entirely unnecessary and provided no benefit. One of thousands of victims was Colten Snyder, whose parents brought him to Bradstreet's office 160 times in eight years.

There was no reason to believe that Colten was suffering from  mercury poisoning. A hair test showed a low level of mercury in his hair-- less than average for his age-- while a urine test found no detectable mercury, and five blood tests over the course of six years showed mercury levels well within the normal range. But Bradstreet insisted that-- since mercury is the only cause of autism-- Colten was suffering from severe mercury poisoning.

What ensued can only be described as medical torture. Colten was subjected to numerous spinal taps, had scopes inserted into his stomach, and-- worst of all-- was forced into years of chelation therapy. Chelation therapy  is a last-resort treatment for serious forms of confirmed heavy metal poisoning. It is only used in extreme cases because it is an inherently dangerous process, even when medically necessary. When administered by quacks like Bradstreet, it routinely causes dehydration, malnutrition, kidney damage, liver damage, allergic reactions, anemia, cancer, and-- ironically-- developmental disabilities caused by the toxicity of the treatment.

Even Jeff Bradstreet himself admitted that Colten reacted poorly to chelation therapy. After each session, he would experience discomfort, illness, weakness, and developmental regression. Yet Bradstreet continued milking Colten's parents for money while administering abusive treatments for eight whole years. In 2009, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims determined that not only had Bradstreet engaged in dangerous and unnecessary mistreatment of Colten, but that Colten's treatment was indicative of a larger pattern of medical abuse of autistic children in Bradstreet's hands.

Bradstreet managed to continue practicing his corrupt and abusive form of medicine, but not without drawing the attention of the FDA. In June of 2015, the FDA raided Bradstreet's office with the help of the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency. Although the FDA hasn't been clear about the reason for the search, the involvement of the GDNA suggests that he may have been involved in dealing controlled substances in addition to his long-standing career in the medical abuse of children. Whatever was found during the raid, it was damning enough that Bradstreet shot himself less than a week after the search, while the FDA carried out their investigation.

It's not surprising that conspiracy theorists have claimed that-- in some mind-blowing effort orchestrated effort by the Pharmaceutical Industry, the FDA, the GDNA, local and federal law enforcement, and an unspecified hitman-- Bradstreet was murdered. They say that this was to hide the success of his "treatments" and to continue covering up a link between autism and immunization. So far, I haven't heard anyone explain how murdering him could have possibly been necessary or beneficial to preserving anyone's profits, but conspiracy theorists aren't known for being the most sane or stable people.

I feel sorry for Jeff Bradstreet's family and loved ones. Losing a loved one is always difficult, especially when it happens through suicide. However, I have very little sympathy for Bradstreet himself. I don't feel sorry for people who become wealthy by abusing children and then make a cowardly escape when there a a threat of accountability. When child abusers die, it makes the world is a safer and healthier place for children. My sympathy goes only to his loved ones and his victims.

Updates on Thalia Vida Gardner

I was going to wait until there was an arrest to give further updates on this case-- a baby girl whose death was blamed on vaccines-- but it's been brought up recently in anti-vaccine groups and has gotten us a renewed wave of hate mail,  so I'll go ahead and share what (little) information I have. This information is based on what's publicly available on Thalia's mother, father, and grandparents' Facebook and crowdfunding pages.

Here is what I know:



-Tyler Justin Gardner is still awaiting and expecting criminal charges.

-Tyler does not have custody or care of his children right now; their son is in CPS custody.

-Tyler says he needs donations because he no longer has money to pay for the lawyer he was going to hire in his criminal defense.

-Karla and Tyler are no longer together.

Post by Thalia's grandmother. The translation is poor but the message gets through.

-Karla's family has a very negative opinion of Tyler and does not believe that Thalia's death was a vaccine reaction. They have not said much because they are legally limited in what they can say.

-The toxicology component of Thalia's autopsy is not yet complete. This process often takes months and it is not unusual that there is not an arrest yet.

-There is still no compelling evidence that Thalia died of a vaccine reaction.

-Tyler is still requesting money for a private autopsy to "prove" that his daughter died of a vaccine reaction. He clearly does not expect her initial autopsy to show a vaccine reaction, or he would not already be preparing for the outcome.

-In the months since Thalia's death, I have received hundreds of comments on the topic. They fall into three categories: rabid anti-vaxxers claiming that vaccines killed Thalia and that I'm a terrible person; angry (and, frankly, embarrassing) messages from Tyler and his mother showing wild inconsistencies in their story and claims about what happened... and dozens, like these, from people who say they are close to the family and know that vaccines did not cause her reaction. I have no way of confirming their authenticity, but they often include detailed information about the family that I was unaware of, that isn't public record.

No, there are no arrests or convictions yet. I can't say definitively that Thalia Vida was murdered by her father. But I can say that she absolutely, positively, did not die of a vaccine reaction, and that in the very least, the authorities have found reason to believe that her father is dangerous and an unfit parent. There will be no justice for Thalia until her toxicology results are complete and her father is given trial through due process, but I remain firmly by belief that her death had nothing at all to do with immunization.

For more information about this case, see our previous posts here.

No, Anti-Vaxxers, I Don't Have Munchausen By Proxy-- But You Might.

Anti-vaccine activists have hurled a number of false, and often strange, accusations at me since I first began publicly advocating for vaccines. Mostly, I hear that I'm not a real person; I'm a sockpuppet for the pharmaceutical industry. I also hear pretty often that I'm a shill. Most recently, a number of anti-vaccine activists informed each other that my daughter does not really have autism. They say that I conditioned her to act autistic, either because I crave victimhood or because I get paid by the pharmaceutical industry for it. They have publicly stated that I suffer from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

MBP is a very serious form of child abuse. It involves a caregiver (usually, but not always, the child's mother) claiming that a child has symptoms of serious illness, and either behaviorally forcing the child to act sick, or actually poisoning, starving, or injuring the child to cause sickness. The victims of MBP are in and out of hospitals with mysterious symptoms. They miss school. They're underweight. Many of them die from their mothers poisoning or starving them. If I had MBP, it would mean that my kids were in very serious danger, and for their sake, I would hope that someone would intervene if that allegation were true.

So let me at least clear this one thing up: no. My children are healthy and very well cared for. My youngest's biggest health problem is that he's cutting his teeth too early and it bugs him. My oldest child's biggest health problem is that she makes poops the size of submarines that I can't flush. They see their doctor routinely, are up-to-date on their immunizations, have never had an unexplained illness, and have never been hospitalized except at birth. My oldest was diagnosed with autism by a team of well-qualified experts who conducted over a dozen tests and closely observed her at home and on the classroom. There is absolutely no merit to that accusation.

The thing that I would find funny if it weren't so tragic is that this accusation came from the anti-vaccine movement, of all places. Not all anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant parents have MBP-- I was once anti-vaccine, and I did not have MBP then and don't have it now-- but almost all people with MBP are anti-vaccine. The anti-vaccine movement provides a safe haven for parents with MBP, both because these parents can often get fraudulent diagnoses from unlicensed health care providers, and because the conspiracy-theorist culture of the anti-vax movement encourages them. It's easy to hide medical abuse when you're among conspiracy theorists who claim that the government hides vaccine injuries and kidnaps babies for no reason.

Many might recall Lacey Spears, the notorious "mommy blogger" whose son spent his entire short life under the care of naturopaths, bouncing from one vague diagnosis to the other, before finally succumbing to poisoning by his mother. And just recently, we wrote about Caroline, a little girl whose parents have been subjecting her to nothing short of medical torture in an attempt to cure her alleged vaccine injury. Caroline's family shows classic symptoms of MBP, right down to their attention-seeking Facebook pages and blogs where they discuss her "struggle."

The anti-vaccine movement is so filled  with Munchausen by proxy that it's alarming. In fact, anti-vaccine websites, forums, and Facebook pages have support forums specifically set aside for parents who say they are being "falsely" accused MBP. Anti-vaccine support groups are full of people giving accounts of what can only be described as MBP symptoms. They diagnose with own children with food allergies, autism, brain damage, encephalitis, heavy metal poisoning, chemical sensitivities, autoimmune disease, systemic yeast infections, and intestinal parasites. They imagine that their children's bodies are delicate snowflakes that can't withstand the vaccines safely tolerated by all but one in a million kids. When their doctors tell them that that their children do not have these conditions, they go elsewhere. They accuse their doctors of fraud and seek naturopaths who back up their misdiagnosis.

Again and again and again, anti-vaccine activists claim that their doctors are involved in fraud or cover-up. When they diagnose their children with lead and mercury poisoning, and the doctors say that the bloodwork doesn't show it, they seek the aid of labs that willfully falsify test results-- enablers of Munchausen by proxy. When they diagnose their own children with encephalitis and their doctors say that crying after a vaccine is normal and not a sign of brain inflammation, they spread conspiracy theories about cover-ups-- neverminding, of course, that children with untreated encephalitis invariably die. When they diagnose their own children with vague food allergies and insensitivities, restricting their diets to the point of causing severe malnutrition, they insist that doctors just "don't know" and that their claims as parents matter more than the results of diagnostic tests.

I would be writing this post for weeks straight if I found all the accounts that sound like Munchausen by proxy by anti-vaccine activists, but here are just a few screencaps of just a few of them.

The thing that's crystal-clear is that the most prominent members of the anti-vaccine movement show all the most worrisome signs of Munchausen by proxy. Their children tend to suffer from vague symptoms that can not be explained through medicine or science. They diagnose their own children with conditions that doctors say they don't have. They put their children through experimental treatments that are condemned by mainstream medical experts. They hop from one "expert" to another when caregivers begin to notice signs that the parents may be responsible for the illness. The scariest thing is that many of them are successful not only in abusing their own children, but also in convincing others to do the same. Anti-vaccine forums have largely become support groups for people with Munchausen by proxy who are helping each other maintain abuse without prosecution or accountability. It's dangerous and it's deadly.

I have two very happy, healthy children. I am grateful for that every single day. My oldest has autism, but I not only don't consider that to be a disease, but her form of autism would be impossible to "condition" or create. There is no way to condition a six-month-old to have gross motor delays or to condition a two-year-old to have echolalia, or to condition a five-year-old to write entire pages of text in perfect mirror-image. These traits are not the result of my conditioning, but of a unique and beautiful neurology that I joyfully accept and embrace. If you could possibly accuse me of having Munchausen by proxy, it might be time to check and make sure that you're not in fact looking into a mirror.

12 Questions About Thalia Vida Gardner's Death

Several days ago, I wrote a blog post related to a story that had been circulating about baby Thalia Vida Gardner, a beautiful black-eyed baby girl who, according to people sharing the story, died after a reaction to twenty vaccines given at once. The blog reveals that Thalia Vida’s father had a long history of drug abuse and violence and that she was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome and opiate overdose at the time of her death… and that there were, in fact, only four vaccines. I also wrote an open letter to Thalia's mother.

Since then, I have been relentlessly attacked. I would be more than happy to listen if some of the supporters of Thalia Vida Gardner’s family could answer a few very simple questions that I have, but, every time I’ve asked them, I’ve been attacked. In the last three days, I was called a shill, a bully, a c*nt, a child abuser, a d*ke, a mother*cker, a sociopath,  a narcissist, and an *sshole. One person said she hoped my children died. Another person said that I am incapable of actually loving my children. Several told me that I am not a real mother because I adopted my kids (even though I gave birth to both of them and I have no idea where they got that idea).

If you’d like to make your case clear for why and how vaccines killed Thalia Vida Gardner, it would serve you well to calmly answer these questions—preferably citing scientifically plausible evidence. Have the answers? Please post them below.

1. If vaccines killed Thalia Vida Gardner, why is her father asking for $10,000 to prove it, since her cause of death was diagnosed in the hospital and will be confirmed by the autopsy? If vaccines were her cause of death, the hospital would have found them to be her cause of death.

2. Thalia Vida Gardner’s mother has posted several places online saying that her family is being accused of shaking her to death. Why would the hospital say she was shaken to death if she was not?

3. Encephalitis, or swelling of the brain, which anti-vaccine activists say killed Thalia, is easy to accurately diagnose. Any child presenting with the symptoms Thalia had would have received an EEG, brain imaging, a spinal tap, and tests of her blood and urine. Why did none of these tests reveal that she had encephalitis, if she had it?

4. After her shots but before her hospitalization, Thalia Vida’s aunt said she was “healthy, happy, and learning to take her first steps,” and her caregiver Felicia Polard-Philips said she was “100%.” Her mother was going about her life as usual; the family moved and she was taking selfies. If she was horribly sick for the entirety of those eight days, why would two people who cared for her say that she was well, and why did the family continue with their day-to-day life?

5. A diagnosis can only be made by a medical expert, usually an MD. In what was are Katie Coyne, the anti-vaccine activist who started spreading Thalia’s story, and Tyler Justin Gardner, Thalia’s father who has never been able to write a coherent sentence, qualified to diagnose Thalia’s alleged vaccine reaction?

6. What imaging, lab tests, and exams did Thalia Vida’s father perform in order to diagnose her with encephalitis? Encephalitis is a rather specific diagnosis and, to arrive at it, the characteristic symptoms have to be present. A positive spinal tap and red-flag blood-work, in addition to neurological symptoms, would have been necessary to arrive at that diagnosis.

7. If Thalia Vida’s father is more qualified to make a medical diagnosis than the medical doctors who treated her, does that mean that he never takes himself or his children to the doctor, and diagnoses himself instead?

8. Thalia Vida’s father posted on our blog stating that her brain was “swelling and bleeding” because of vaccines between her immunization and her hospitalization. Symptoms of these conditions include loss of motor skills (like no longer being able to sit or stand), loss of balance, fainting, vomiting, screaming, lethargy, confusion, high fever, aversion to light, a limp body, and a bulging soft spot. Why did Thalia have no symptoms of either of these conditions in these photos with her aunt, and how was she gaining new motor skills during a time that her motor skills would have rapidly declined?

9. Although he stated in one post that he doesn’t believe that “anyone with any care in them could shake her to death.” (Funny that he includes “to death,” as if shaking her would have been okay as long as she didn’t die.) And yet this man has a documented criminal history that includes battery and domestic violence. Why should we believe that someone who is capable of battering his wife, is not also capable of hurting his child?

10. If there has in fact been a massive conspiracy to hide that Thalia died of vaccine-related encephalitis, how did dozens of people with no connection to one another orchestrate this? Do cover up an actual case of encephalitis, it would require that everyone from the nurse who checked her temperature, to the paramedics who first arrived on the scene, to the secretary at the lab that processed her blood work, all agree to the same lie. This is not possible.

11. Thalia Vida’s father has stated repeatedly that the opiates found in Thalia’s blood stream were caused by an antidote given to her by paramedics who (for apparently no conceivable reason) misdiagnosed her with opiate overdose. Naxolone does not cause a positive opiate test, so this could not have caused her to test positive at the hospital. What caused Thalia Vida to test positive for opiates?

12. To those of you who have tweaked, twisted, altered, and cherry-picked the details of Thalia Vida’s death to promote your stance against vaccines: you are sick people for preying on a grieving mother and a culture of paranoid parents in order to promote your dangerous agenda. How do you look at yourself in the mirror?

A Home Birth Midwife Killed My Child

Guest post by Bambi Chapman

On June 4th 2008, I awoke like any regular day. I was 36 weeks pregnant with my sixth child and looking forward to meeting the little person I had been carrying. Our home birth was planned and we were using the midwife I had previously hired. She was amazing and I had complete faith in my body and the process. There wasn’t an ounce of fear within me.

I did not anticipate that I would go into labor that day. I still had 25 days till my due date. My oldest child was born at exactly 36 weeks with a nuchal cord, which meant he was born blue and floppy, but with medical help, he did great. My midwife was completely fine with a slightly early delivery and I trusted her judgment. I went on with my day like usual, even taking my daughter to her ballet practice. I would stop and breathe, then go about everything. After going home, I spent the night going between my tub and birth ball.

In the middle of the night, I lay in the tub thinking "This hurts. I should just go to the hospital." I knew this meant I was getting closer. I was able to check and feel the dilation, which let me know that I was making improvement. Sometime after 3 am a.m. on the June 5th I woke up my husband because I no longer could labor alone. We called my midwife at 4:10 am to let her know she needed to come.

By 4:40 am the midwife had not arrived and I knew the birth was imminent. My husband panicked and called 911 because we were alone and he didn’t want to have to deliver our baby. Unfortunately for him, the moment he hung up with them, he had to deliver our daughter. Just moments later we had medics filing into our home. They weren’t educated on childbirth, so when they knew this was a planned home birth with a midwife, they decided to just wait on her.

At 5:45, nearly three hours after I had called, my midwife walked in the door. She briefly looked us over and advised against transport. As soon as she sent the medics on their way, she helped us out of the tub and into my bedroom. I was exhausted, having been awake for 26+ hours, and laboring for 18 of those. By this time, we had a few concerns about our daughter that she explained away, and all explanations were completely plausible. She said that Mary Beth was healthy, and we trusted that she was an expert.

Several hours later, my husband offered to let me nap while he took care of all the children. Our daughter needed some sunlight due to jaundice already showing up, so that was a great idea to me. This would be the last time that I would hold my living daughter. Just an hour after I lay down, my husband woke me up as he thought she had stopped breathing. I took her from him and she was lifeless. We had to call 911 again that day and do CPR on our brand new healthy baby.

As I saw the ambulance pull up, I ran her to the door and handed her to the medic. They had me put on shoes so I could go with her. Although the hospital was 10 minutes away, it seemed to take forever. The details are still fuzzy, but I remember bits and pieces. The most prominent memory that I have is “We’ve given her two shots of epinephrine and she’s not responding”. I was in disbelief because I thought I had done everything right and that she was healthy.

This being the death of a "healthy" baby, an investigation was opened. To our surprise, the detective shared the newborn exam form that our midwife had given him, which was not the same one we had. My husband was at the police department before her funeral because of this form. The detective called her on it, and so she created another one. The detective had everything in hand, so he knew where the inconsistencies were in her story.

Word was out within the midwifery community before our daughter was even buried, which led to the midwife waiting on our steps when we got home from the cemetery. She was angry that other midwives were discussing her potential negligence and the legalities that could ensue.

Four weeks later we received Mary Beth’s death certificate. One of the lines on this form is "Major Contributing Factor," which had been filled in with, "Home Birth." That was not the answer that I was anticipating. I had convinced myself that she had some kind of disease or congenital anomaly to where we weren’t even going to have more children. With that paper in hand, I called the medical examiner for answers. My midwife completely missed respiratory distress and had she realized this was the problem, our daughter could have received the medical care she needed and would have survived.

Our midwife found out that we had the death certificate, which led to multiple manipulative and panicked emails from her. She was kind enough to send prenatal records, which she had gone back and scribbled over my gestational ages to make it seem as though I was already 37 weeks and full term. We later learned that our daughter was not the first lost baby and has not been the last. The detective found an excerpt from an ebook in which our midwife bragged about the many ways in which she would not cooperate with law enforcement, impede investigations, and had walked away from a manslaughter charge. He labeled my daughter’s death a negligent homicide, but due to politics and legal matters, would not attempt to file charges.

Within six months of our daughter’s death, I had created enemies where friends once stood because I chose to stand up. Some women were angry enough that they took to harassment, stalking, threats, and slander in an attempt to silence me. I’ve been banned from many places because I have dared to speak up. Many have blamed me for her death because I should have been more educated, should have known something was wrong, and should have vetted my midwife better. The thing was that I trusted my midwife. She had glowing recommendations. She gave us all the right answers, and on top of already having had one homebirth with this midwife. I had been an avid homebirth supporter for almost 7 years before my daughter’s birth.

Mentally, I struggled with myself for several years. I attempted suicide shortly after her death. I had to get to where I swallowed back the guilt because I couldn’t handle it. It was just too much. As the slander, threats, harassment, and stalking came to a head, it brought back everything that I had dealt with. This time, I made the “Help me” phone call instead of doing anything. I know women want so badly to squash their vulnerabilities, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of a grieving mother. I didn’t ask for, nor did I want this.


I wanted a happy life with my family and that included my little girl.

This isn’t something you would wish on your worst enemy.



Note from Back From Nature:

We want to deeply thank Bambi for being brave enough to share her story. Discussing loss is extremely painful for all mothers, and after a death as traumatic as Mary Beth's, it's particularly amazing that her mother is selfless enough to speak up to prevent similar tragedies from befalling other families.

Bambi, Mary Beth's death was in no way your fault. It was the fault of an irresponsible practitioner who was fed and fueled by a dangerous subculture. We hope you continue to heal from your trauma and we wish you and your family happier days ahead. 

Thalia Vida Gardner: Did Vaccines Really Kill Her?

In the days in which I feared immunization, there were few things that panicked me more than what I saw today: stories of children killed by vaccines. Today, I saw them in the form of screenshots from the Facebook account of Karla Gardner, a mom whose eleven-month-old baby died after receiving routine immunizations. The way the screenshots are selected and placed by those sharing the story makes it clear that vaccines were to blame, and it's a chilling thing to witness:

A healthy baby girl goes in for her shots...

Spikes a high fever...

Becomes very, very sick...

Needs a miracle...

Won't make it through the night...

And passes away.

These stories are sacred to the anti-vaccine movement. When you see or read about a dead child, you don't care about numbers and statistics. You're consumed by fear that it could happen to you. You want justice for the child and the parents. You want to know that it won't happen again. You'll gladly donate to the pages set up to fund-raise for the child's funeral.

Through all the fear, you might not notice, for example, that on the mother's Facebook page, the posts about her daughter's death appear on March 6th, an entire nine days after she was vaccinated. You might be so distracted by the grief and agony that you don't see that, in the nine days between the check-up and her daughter's death, Mom wasn't posting about having a critically ill daughter, as she would be if her child were in the throes of encephalitis.

She was posting selfies:

You might also fail to notice that, in a conversation with a caregiver, the caregiver said that Thalia Vida was "100%" and was hard to keep up with her because she was being so active. She had only a small red bump at the site of the injection:

She was actually quite well in photos taken on February 28, halfway between the shots and her hospitalization:

Dig a little deeper and you'll find some other things that are rather troubling-- like that, immediately, Karla Gardner's friends kept the details of the story hushed:

You might discover that Thalia's father has been insistent that he had nothing to do with his daughter's death:

Or you might find the page where he's asking for money to help him  defend himself against murder charges find the real cause of her death, since he says the hospital was wrong.

You might find that Thalia Vida's mother didn't say that vaccines were the cause of her daughter's death until several days later, at which point it came up because the hospital had a specific accusation:

Or you might find Thalia Vida's aunt's account of what happened, starting with the day of the incident:

And continuing later:

According to her aunt's account, Thalia Vida was hospitalized after she overdosed on an opiate. Police found a substance scattered on the floor of her home that matches the description of black tar heroin. Hospital staff later discovered that her brain swelling was actually consistent with injuries associated with shaken baby syndrome, which was her final cause of death.

I'm not a judge and I'm not on the jury for this case. But I will say that it seems to me that one of two things happened:

1. Thalia Vida suffered a severe reaction to a vaccine, which is something that happens in fewer than one in a million cases, and died of vaccine-induced encephalitis. She was for some reason well between when the shot was given and when she developed encephalitis a full eight days later. The doctors, nurses, coroner, and police all engaged in a cover-up of her vaccine-related death. To cover for a pharmaceutical company that none of them have any connection to, they accused the parents of shaking Thalia Vida and/or allowing her to access dangerous prescription drugs, including scattering them through the child's home after her death. The parents are now being prosecuted because of this cover-up. Thalia Vida's aunt was also in on the conspiracy and lied from the moment of her hospitalization in order to accuse two innocent people of child abuse.

2. Eight days after a check-up that found that she was well, Thalia Vida's father left drugs where she could access them and shook her, both of which caused her to experience swelling and bleeding in her brain. She died a horrible, premature, and unnecessary death the next day, a full nine days after her immunizations. When the parents realized that they could get sympathy, money, and help covering up the crime by calling it a vaccine injury, they began promoting the idea that vaccines killed their baby.

I'll let you decide for yourself which is more likely.