On Science, Johnson Asks the Right Question

Senator Johnson on Suppressing Scientific Research

When it comes to ever-burgeoning questions about scientific validity, and particularly concerning issues about vaccine safety, the central issue isn’t really whether vaccine injury is vastly underreported, or whether vaccines cause autism or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS); it’s whether legitimate scientific inquiry into those possibilities is being discouraged or suppressed—and, if so, why?

The answer is yes, and that’s precisely why it is the first question that must be asked.

As usual, Wisconsin’s own Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson is asking that question, this time with respect to SIDS, and in doing so he is trying to force the issue back into public view. For if science is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads, why are the government and corporate media and the medical establishment treating reports and studies about vaccine-related infant deaths as matters to suppress rather than investigate?

If they really wanted to know the truth, that is.

This past week, Johnson, the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote to the journal Toxicology Reports and its owner, Elsevier, demanding that they produce documents and explain their decision to remove a previously published article by Neil Miller titled “Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature.”

Miller’s article, which discussed the potential connection between SIDS and vaccines, was publicly available online for five years before Toxicology Reports removed it on April 9. Comments on X and PubPeer were deciding factors, Johnson wrote in his June 30 letter.

“This decision was reportedly driven by anonymous comments made on a post-publication discussion board called PubPeer,” Johnson wrote. “The decision to remove this peer-reviewed article five years after the article was first published raises questions about the integrity of the scientific review process at the journal.”

As Johnson recapped it, the article analyzed cases of SIDS in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), gave a comprehensive review of the medical literature, and “found that a substantial proportion of infant deaths and SIDS cases occurred” shortly after vaccination.

A few months later, Johnson pointed out, in November 2021, two comments about the article were posted by an anonymous user on PubPeer, a popular post-publication discussion board. No other comments were posted on the board.

“According to reports, on December 18, 2025, four years after the comments were posted on PubPeer, Miller received an email from Toxicology Reports’ Editor-in-Chief, Lawrence Lash, raising ‘[c]oncerns from multiple parties’ regarding ‘potential research errors and misleading statements about vaccine efficacy’ contained in the article,” Johnson wrote. “Lash included a link to PubPeer and the Twitter thread and requested a response from Miller.”

Miller apparently responded, Johnson wrote, but the responses didn’t wash, and the article was removed, with Lash accusing Miller of asserting a causal link between vaccines and SIDS.

“According to an April 9, 2026, notice posted on Toxicology Reports’ website, Miller’s article was removed from the journal ‘at the request of the Editor-in-Chief,’” he wrote. “Regarding Miller’s analysis, the removal notice stated, in part, that ‘serious methodological flaws were identified in the use of VAERS data to infer a correlation between vaccination and sudden infant death syndrome[.]’”

But, as Johnson pointed out, that wasn’t true, and not anywhere close to being true.

“This given explanation for the removal, however, failed to acknowledge Miller’s own recognition of similar limitations in his article, where he noted that the data merely suggested a causal relationship warranting further investigation,” the senator wrote, getting once again to the real point of scientific investigation—the need for further investigation, as Miller himself had urged.

Johnson wrote that his concerns echoed those of Health & Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and that in his hearing on vaccine injuries the issue of SIDS and vaccination had been raised poignantly:

Johnson said that was the point of his letter, and that finding the truth—not burying questions about it—should be the foremost concern of the scientific community: “We owe it to this mother and all parents that have lost a child to SIDS to encourage and promote—instead of discourage and remove—medical research into the potential connection between vaccines and pediatric deaths.”

In his letter, Johnson is pivoting toward something particularly important in the current scientific debate. He is casting the issue not as proving vaccines cause SIDS but asking why published research disappeared after anonymous online criticism. His argument is that scientific debate should be addressed with better science, not with retrospective erasure, and his approach immediately establishes the broader issue as one of institutional transparency and rigorous inquiry rather than as one of medical certainty.

The irony is—rather, the gaslighting is—that that has always been the approach of the vaccine-skeptical community. The reality is that the majority of the so-called “anti-vax” community is not opposed to all vaccines or to a reasonable schedule, while totalitarian certainty resides almost exclusively in the scientific establishment.

The truth is out there

As it happens, I have previously reported on Miller’s paper, back in 2023 for The Lakeland Times, and had the opportunity to look then at the both at the general issue of whether vaccines could plausibly play a role in SIDS, as well as one family’s case before the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program’s court, in which a federal special master (the compensation court’s term for the judge) accepted a medical theory linking vaccination and SIDS before the decision was reversed on appeal.

Before that investigation, and before speaking with affected families, I didn’t know much about the topic, though the persistence of SIDS in the United States had long been a medical mystery. As I wrote then, new studies at the time focused on the roles that serotonin and cytokines play in vulnerable infants during critical periods of development: serotonin levels are lowered when circulating cytokine levels are high, and studies have linked SIDS to low serotonin levels.

The research bolstered reams of research from earlier years.

It also led many researchers to point fingers at early vaccinations as a potential cause. These researchers have produced research that both documents a temporal association between vaccination and SIDS—that’s what Miller’s study did—and underscores that early vaccinations can spike cytokine levels in infants.

The temporal association was especially strong, I reported, especially Miller’s documentation in the 2021 Toxicology Reports paper. His analysis of VAERS data found that, of 2,605 infant deaths reported to VAERS from 1990 through 2019, 58 percent occurred within three days after vaccination and 78.3 percent occurred within seven days after vaccination.

Those numbers confirmed a close temporal proximity of infant deaths to vaccine injection, Miller wrote.

That was the extent of Miller’s claim—the removal of the paper is thus the removal of fact—but the United States government and the pharmaceutical industry dismissed any association whatsoever. Among other things, they pointed out that VAERS data itself presupposed finding a temporal association because that is the purpose of reporting to VAERS—when an adverse event occurs soon after vaccination.

Still, that does not make the numbers useless, for, digging deeper, Miller’s work does indeed suggest a causal relation that needs further investigation. Specifically, he wrote, of those 2,605 infant deaths, 21.7 percent occurred between eight and 60 days after vaccination. But, as Miller pointed out, that represented an average of 11 per day as compared to 760 infant deaths that occurred on Day 2 post-vaccination—a 69-fold increase.

“If the 2,605 deaths which occurred within 60 days of vaccination were randomly distributed throughout this interval, one would expect 43.42 deaths per day or 304 per week,” the study stated. “The excess of deaths on the day of vaccination (43 were expected/440 occurred), within 3 days post-vaccination (130 were expected/1,512 occurred), and in the first week post-vaccination (304 were expected/2,041 occurred) were all statistically significant.”

The cascade of deaths in the first days following vaccination establishes a likely association between those reported deaths and vaccination, Miller argued. In addition, the fact that those were only compiled from VAERS reports said nothing about non-VAERS reported deaths, because many SIDS deaths following vaccination are undoubtedly not reported, some say by as much as a factor of 100.

That’s not all. As I reported in The Times, Miller’s findings and concerns were neither outliers nor new but reiterative and emphatic. They followed a raft of other doctors and researchers who for decades pointed to possible links between SIDS and vaccination for decades. In one example, in 1982, William Torch, then the director of Child Neurology in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, presented a study on the relationship between the DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) vaccine and SIDS.

“Preliminary data on the first 70 cases studied shows that two-thirds had been immunized prior to death,” Torch wrote. “....In the DPT-SIDS group, 6.5 percent died within 12 hours of inoculation, 13 percent within 24 hours, 26 percent within three days, and 37 percent, 61 percent and 70 percent within one, two and three weeks, respectively.”

Torch also found that unvaccinated babies who died from SIDS did so most often in the fall or winter while vaccinated babies died non-seasonally: “SIDS frequencies peaked at age 2 months in the non-DPT group, and had a biphasic peak occurrence at 2 and 4 months in the DPT group.”

As Miller pointed out, those latter ages are when infants receive their initial DPT doses.

Torch later produced a second work buttressing his findings, which are supported by at least nine other studies. To be sure, and it’s important to note, opposing studies have found no clustering, though critics say some of them are also freighted with potential methodological flaws (primarily by overlooking diagnostic shifting in the classification of SIDS deaths over the years), and freighted even more by conflicts of interest.

For example, one 1987 study by Dr. Alexandr M. Walker clearing vaccinations was funded by, among others, the federal Food and Drug Administration; Burroughs Wellcome Co.; Ciba-Geigy; Glaxo Inc.; Hoffmann-La Roche Inc.; Lederle Laboratories; Lilly Research Laboratories; McNeil Pharamceuticals, Merck, and Pfizer Inc.

The truth is, the alleged link between SIDS and vaccination is much like the link between autism and vaccination: There are a multitude of peer-reviewed studies on both sides, about equal in number between those showing a correlative link and those showing no link, and those who say there is no correlation have their own methodological problems with opposing studies.

The issue was perhaps best framed by Dr. Motoki Osawa of the Tokai University School of Medicine in his own 2019 paper in The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology: “Sudden infant deaths might be attributable to adverse reaction to vaccination, but separating them from coincidental occurrences is difficult.”

At the very least, it’s an open debate, though it’s not presented that way in the corporate media, which uniformly tout the pharmaceutical corporate perspective. It is also apparently not up for discussion, if the removal of the article from Toxicology Reports is any indication, and that’s why Johnson’s letter becomes so important.

It’s also important because respected judicial proceedings have already wrestled seriously with the issue. In a case I reported for The Times—Boatmon & Cupid v HHS—a family whose child died of SIDS prevailed in their case before seeing it overturned, a decision that itself included a sharply worded appellate dissent arguing that the majority ignored both evidence and the intent of the Vaccine Act.

Whether one agrees with the outcome or not, these issues have received far more serious consideration than is often acknowledged publicly.

Plausible and likely

What passed muster before the special master in the Boatmon case was indeed a plausible medical theory linking SIDS and vaccination, embodied in what the medical community has called the Triple Risk Factor since 1994. According to this model, “SIDS occurs when: (1) an infant in a critical development period; (2) possessing an underlying vulnerability; (3) encounters an exogenous stressor,” and SIDS only occurs when all three factors are present.

With risk of oversimplifying, the critical development period is the first year of life, and more often considered the first six months of life. The second risk factor is a vulnerable infant, due to either environmental or genetic factors. Through the years, the most significant risk factor identified by scientists is a brain stem abnormality “in the neuroregulation of cardiorespiratory control,” in other words, a neurochemical abnormality focused on a child’s serotonin system.

That’s important, as I reported in 2023 for The Times, because that system is key to a body’s internal environmental controls, the ability to maintain a constant internal environment, allowing “survival over a wide range of external environmental conditions.”

The lead researcher in developing that model was Dr. Hannah C. Kinney, who posited that “deficits in the …system will lead to imbalances in respiratory, cardiovascular, and/or metabolic regulation—including in response to stress—in the pediatric age range, particularly in the first days and months following birth.”

And, the researchers have written, “insufficient function of the 5-HT [serotonin] system, which is necessary for breathing, leaves an infant vulnerable to a variety of crisis situations.”

Of course, there must also always be a “critical exogenous factor” causing that insufficient function, according to the model. A prone sleep position, face-down position, covered face in the supine position, soft bedding, bed sharing, over-bundling, elevated room temperature, and minor infection at the time of death, have all been identified as such stressors, which, the literature suggests, act as triggers.

In 2009, Kinney and her colleagues wrote that a causal role for mild infection in sudden infant death was suggested by reports that in approximately half of SIDS “the infants have a seemingly trivial infection around the time of death….”

The theory is that such infections stimulate a cytokine response. Elevated cytokine levels suppress the serotonin system, and can, in those infants with an underlying abnormality, trigger a fatal response, essentially an inability to process carbon dioxide in the system. And, if that’s the case, the Boatmon special master asked and the petitioners alleged, could vaccinations, which cause cytokine levels to spike, have triggered the same tragic perfect storm:

“In infants who die unexpectedly of infection, the given organism may precipitate a lethal cytokine cascade or toxic response,” the special master wrote. “The question arises as to whether the cytokine response stimulated by vaccination can have the same effect as a mild or trivial infection in a baby who presumably has a defect in the medullary 5-HT system.”

Obviously, the special master decided the answer was yes after plowing through more than a score of studies and considering expert testimony on both sides.

But the family’s victory was short-lived, overturned on appeal, and a common occurrence because the government uses relentless appeals to limit or reduce compensation or to reverse the decision altogether. They almost always win.

And that’s just what happened in Boatmon v HHS. They won before the special master, only to lose twice on appeal, once before the United States Court of Federal Claims and again in the U.S. Court of Appeals. The bottom line of the appeal was that merely plausible or likely wasn’t good enough. The appellants had to prove causation, an impossible standard that would render virtually all contested cases in the compensation court futile.

The decision prompted an unusual and blistering dissent about the process in the U.S. Court of Appeals: “The record shows, on undisputed facts that [this child’s] injury and death more-likely-than-not were reasonably attributable to vaccine. My colleagues’ ruling ignores the evidence, negates the statutory purpose, and contravenes the policy of supporting public health and well-being.”

What’s more, the judge wrote, the majority assumed what it was trying to prove—its starting point was that the theory of the case was not sound and reliable; therefore, by definition, they failed to show that vaccinations caused or contributed to the child’s death from SIDS.

But the appeals panel produced no more evidence showing the theory to be unreliable or unsound than there was showing it to be sound and reliable, and that was critical, the dissenting judge contended.

“Meanwhile, common sense must suffice,” the judge wrote...

There are practical realities that demand that any potential associations between SIDS and vaccines be pursued. Just recently, a mother was arrested in the deaths of her twin children—deaths occurring just eight days after vaccination. The police have conducted an investigation, and a grand jury has issued an indictment for murder, and the case must be adjudicated. But as it works its way through the judicial system, there are troubling aspects that demand thorough investigation.

For one thing, the mother, Andrea Shaw, had previously sued the American Academy of Pediatrics for spreading false information about vaccines. For another, she had warned doctors about a family history of bad reactions to vaccines and had taken her children for medical treatment when they became ill the day after vaccination. Here’s how her complaint states it:

“Andrea Shaw is the mother of fraternal twins Dallas and Tyson Shaw, who both died May 1, 2025, eight days after receiving their 18-month vaccines. On April 23, 2025, both twins were administered hepatitis A, influenza, and DTaP vaccines at their pediatrician’s office in Payette, Idaho.”

Prior to vaccination, the complaint stated, Shaw and her mother-in-law warned the pediatrician about a family history of adverse reactions to the flu vaccine on the father’s side.

“The pediatrician dismissed these concerns, consistent with AAP’s contraindications framework, which does not generally recognize family history of vaccine reactions as a basis for delaying or declining vaccination,” the complaint states. “The following day, April 24, 2025, both twins were brought to the St. Luke’s Emergency Room with severe symptoms including blue lips, lethargy, and sunken eyes. The treating emergency room physician documented the diagnosis as ‘post-immunization reaction, initial encounter.”

On May 1, the twins died.

Shaw and her attorneys say the post-death investigation should have focused on the documented post-immunization reaction as a potential cause of death, but instead local authorities opened a homicide investigation.

“Prosecutors have theorized that she caused her children’s deaths through a ‘postpartum blackout’ or that ‘the house was too hot,’” the complaint states. “This criminal investigation is a foreseeable consequence of AAP’s fraudulent safety claims: when the medical system has been told that vaccines cannot cause serious injury or death, grieving parents become suspects rather than victims.”

That sounds suspiciously like the reasoning in the court of appeals in the Boatmon case: The government told the panel that vaccines cannot cause serious injury or death, and so that’s what the appeals panel concluded.

“AAP’s categorical safety claims, disseminated through pediatricians and public-facing materials, induced Mrs. Shaw to consent to vaccination despite her expressed concerns about family history,” the complaint states. “Those same categorical claims now form the basis for criminal suspicion against her, as investigators assume vaccines could not have caused her children’s deaths. Mrs. Shaw’s injuries are continuing because AAP continues to disseminate the same false safety claims that induced her consent and that now imperil her liberty.”

The bottom line is, at the very least, decades of research have produced conflicting findings. Some studies report statistically significant temporal clustering of infant deaths after vaccination, while others reject any causal association. Researchers continue investigating biological mechanisms involving serotonin regulation, cytokines, immune activation, and infant vulnerability, while even newer research indicates that underdeveloped liver enzyme pathways in some infants could make it difficult to process certain vaccine ingredients, which in turn could result in SIDS.

The point being, as new research raises even more questions, as moms are arrested and charged with murder, and as families continue to lose their infants to SIDS and toddlers to sudden unexplained death in childhood, we need more research and transparency, not less. Hopefully, Johnson’s letter represents an important turning point. Good science welcomes criticism, replication, additional evidence, and rebuttal.

Removing published research years later inevitably raises questions about confidence in the scientific process itself. As Johnson wrote in his letter, parents who have lost children deserve honest investigation wherever the evidence ultimately leads. That principle is worth defending, and worth defending regardless of where someone stands on vaccines themselves.