Lorrin Danielle Kain: A Reason Not to Vaccinate?

In 1994, a car seat manufacturer produced a small lot of defective car seats. A six-week-old baby was seriously injured as a result and suffered from traumatic brain injury that led to long-term disability, and, fifteen years later, death. The little girl and her family were compensated by the company and the car seat was recalled.

Nothing can change or undo what happened to this little girl. Nothing can take away a parent's grief. No statistics about "one in a million" can temper the anger directed at the car seat manufacturer. It was a tragedy. A horrible, deadly, and possibly preventable tragedy, and fury and despair are understandable reactions.

But should the parents be trying to persuade others to never use any car seats, ever again?

This is exactly what happened in the heartbreaking case of Lorrin Danielle Kain, a beautiful little girl who passed away in 2009-- except that it wasn't a car seat. It was a vaccine.

After reading everything I could find about Lorrin and her condition, I have a few nagging doubts about whether Lorrin's condition was genuinely a vaccine reaction. At least a few people have pointed out that Lorrin's symptoms actually match Dravet syndrome, a serious form of epilepsy that has not been linked to immunization. But let's assume that Lorrin suffered and died because of vaccines.

That still isn't a good reason not to vaccinate your kids. 

Lorrin suffered because of a bad batch, not because vaccines are fundamentally dangerous. According to Lorrin's mother, Lorrin received a dose from a "hot lot"-- a defective batch of vaccines that caused "seizures or worse" in eleven children who received it. As tragic as it is, defective batches happen in absolutely all kinds of products. Consider, for example, that contaminated foods cause 3,000 deaths per year and go nearly unnoticed. Cantaloupe from a farm that had received "superior" health inspection ratings from multiple third parties killed 33 people in 2011, but I didn't hear anyone say that cantaloupe should be banned. We need both food and medicine to survive. Tragedies like this are reason to call for better safety in food and medicine, not to abandon them entirely. |

Not only has the batch been off the market for over two decades, but so has the entire line of inoculations. The DTP vaccine-- the one that caused Lorrin's reaction-- is not available anymore in the United States. Lorrin's mother and her supporters often conflate the DTP vaccine, which Lorrin received, with the Tdap and DTaP vaccines, which are part of the modern immunization schedule. They're not the same thing, and it's dangerous to treat them like they are. Conflating the Lorrin's vaccine with DTaP is like comparing the inactivated polio vaccine-- which can't possibly cause polio infection-- with the live-virus inoculation, which can. It's a completely different shot with completely different risks, and modern medicine has dramatically reduced the risks associated with many immunizations.

So what's different? The D, T, and P stand for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. All variations of this class of vaccine-- and there are many-- protect against these three serious illnesses. DTP, which was given until the mid-nineties. contained whole cells of the diseases it protected against, and that meant a relatively large number of side effects, mostly in the form of fevers and local swelling. But DTP is a thing of the past, a chapter in medical history books not far from the smallpox vaccine.

The "a"s in DTaP and Tdap, which are given today, stand for acellular, meaning that they contain just a few proteins from the pertussis bacterium. The use of acellular vaccines is a victory for modern medicine: the  American Academy of Pediatrics points out that, today, we protect against 11 diseases by exposing kids to just 130 antigens (proteins from germs). Compare that to a hundred years ago, when a single smallpox vaccine contained 200 antigens altogether. As much as parents fear overwhelming the immune system, kids' bodies actually just need to react to a few little pieces of germs in today's schedule.

As a result of these advancements, today's DTaP shots are even less likely than their predecessors to cause serious adverse events. The advent of acellular vaccines means that kids today have about 90% fewer side effects from DTaP than they did from its predecessor twenty years ago.  In other words, the vaccine that your baby would get in 2015 is only one-tenth as dangerous as the vaccine that caused Lorrin's reaction in 1994.

Even if we were still using the DTP vaccine that Lorrin received, the risk of a serious adverse reaction would still be infinitesimally small. The World Health Organization reports that serious adverse reactions occurred in only about 1 in 750,000 children who received the vaccine, when it was available. By comparison, diphtheria had a death rate of about 1 in 5. Untreated tetanus kills 1 in 4-- and with excellent treatment might kill as few as 1 in 9 and cause permanent disability in 1 in 3. 

In developing countries where most moms are unvaccinated and can't pass tetanus immunity to their newborns, tetanus still accounts for nearly 1 in 5 newborn deaths. Pertussis (also known as whooping cough) is the most mild of the three infections, but is still pretty serious: it kills 1 in 50 babies who contract it and lands 2 out of 3 in the hospital. Even when we still relied on the modern DTaP vaccine's whole-cell predecessor, it was still very much worth the risk. 

Lorrin's mother found comfort by aligning herself with the anti-vaccine movement and its claims that vaccines cause autism. The anti-vax website Age of Autism regularly features information about Lorrin and her family, and Lorrin's image and story are promoted on autism-related websites and social media pages as evidence of the link between autism and vaccines. This doesn't make much sense to me. Lorrin did not have autism-- it was never, ever part of her diagnosis. She may have developed an adverse reaction to a vaccine, but "I believe the MMR vaccine causes autism because Lorrin Kain developed brain damage from DTP," makes about as much sense as, "I believe that aspirin causes cancer because I heard of someone who died from a penicillin allergy." It is neither the same substance nor the same condition. The people exploiting Lorrin's death to promote their agenda are helping no one.

Statistics don't do much to quell grief. I could never look Lorrin's mother in the eye and tell her, "Your daughter's death was worth it because vaccines save lives."

But I could also never say, "Your child's death was worth it because a defective batch of DTP vaccines hurt someone 21 years ago," to the mothers of Callie Van Tornhout, Brie Romaguera, Brady Alcaide, Landon Dube, or any of the other thousands upon thousands of children who die because of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. I can not justify the abandonment of an entire class of live-saving preventative medications because a tiny number of people have suffered from adverse reactions.

Lorrin's family will always have my deepest sympathies. I believe that no parent should ever lose a child. It is not a pain that I would wish on my worst enemies, and I consider myself lucky every day that my children are healthy and happy. It is because of that-- because of my desire to see children live and thrive-- that I am a vaccine advocate. We can't let extraordinarily rare accidents lead us to abandon a miracle of modern medicine that saves so many new and innocent lives. 

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.