Conspiracy theories are common, especially in today's age, when all it takes is one person to spread a rumor for it to go viral. Most of the time, the consequences of conspiracy theories are mild: people choosing to drink only bottled water, or spending hours trying to melt snow with a cigarette lighter. Other times, they can be outright dangerous -- and, as I learned recently, the dangerous ones catch wind quickly and in ways that jeopardize lives.
The most-recent horrifying conspiracy theory I've witnessed comes from a woman who identifies herself as Dr. Rima Laibow. She claims to be a physician and a 1977 graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, but I wasn't able to verify her credentials, and I haven't been able to find a licensed physician with that name practicing anywhere in the U.S. That doesn't stop her from making dangerously outlandish claims from a point of "expertise." Specifically, she claims that shaken baby syndrome is not real, and that the symptoms of shaken baby syndrome are actually caused by routine childhood vaccines.
Unfortunately, as I've heard from several parents, her beliefs are not uncommon among conspiracy theorists. Natural News, VacTruth, Nexus Magazine, and Shirley's Wellness all have well-trafficked reports supposedly linking shaken baby syndrome to ordinary disease-preventing vaccines.
This is a particularly dangerous kind of conspiracy theory, because it throws two heart-stopping punches at once: telling parents that it's not a big deal to shake babies (because, after all, the trauma associated with it isn't real), and telling parents that they need to avoid important, disease-preventing childhood vaccines because of the imaginary danger of causing lethal brain damage to infants.
It doesn't take much to show where Ms. Laibow is wrong. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention details just how shaken baby syndrome happens, and it doesn't -- and can't -- involve the use of vaccines. Babies with shaken baby syndrome characteristically have bleeding in their brains and eyes, and often have other signs of physical trauma too, including broken skulls and backbones. Not only does common sense make it clear that a vaccine cannot cause physiological trauma involving broken bones, but the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System does not include a single reported case of a vaccine causing the symptoms identified as shaken baby syndrome. It's also worth noting that about 40 percent of babies with shaken baby syndrome show evidence that they were abused in the past, according to a report in Pediatrics.
I decided to contact Ms. Laibow myself for some form of evidence that there is a link between vaccines and shaken baby syndrome, since she was widely promoting these beliefs with no cited sources. I demanded, "Show me the peer-reviewed medical journal that describes retinal hemorrhage and shattered vertebrae as a side effect of vaccines."
Her response was: "Glad to. The references are in the 50+ page book that attendees will receive and there are many more. Of course, you would have to read them rather than just reacting viscerally to the information that you are not familiar with."
In other words, you have to pay her money to hear scientific evidence of her claims. It reeks of B.S. to me, but, frighteningly enough, she has a large following of concerned parents who are convinced of her claim that vaccines kill babies, in ways that conveniently look exactly like child abuse. If these ideas gain traction, they could cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies who die of either vaccine-preventable illness, or of trauma from being aggressively shaken by an adult.
Know the facts and do something about it. Vaccines are safe. Shaking a baby is not. If you hear from parents who deny the dangers of shaking babies or who believe that vaccines are linked to such serious adverse effects, please take the time to think critically about what you're hearing, and to consult your children's healthcare provider about any concerns you may have. Your children deserve to be safe from dangerous conspiracy theories.
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