A Shot in the Dark (1985)

By Barbara Loe Fisher and Harris Coulter - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

Daniel Shannon, director of the Pediatric Pulmonary Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and a principal investigator of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome funded by the Public Health Service, told an FDA meeting in March 1979 that he had systematically documented data on nearly 200 infants who experienced prolonged apnea—cessation of breathing requiring resuscitation—within twenty-four hours of receiving DPT shots. The data was recorded on tabular sheets and available for analysis. Three years later, when Shannon published an extensive two-part SIDS study in the New England Journal of Medicine, partially financed by the same Public Health Service, he omitted this data entirely. A Shot in the Dark (1985), by medical historian Harris Coulter and parent advocate Barbara Loe Fisher, documents this burial alongside decades of suppressed evidence establishing that the whole-cell pertussis vaccine—a crude preparation essentially unchanged since 1912—causes seizures, brain damage, and death in an unknown number of American infants each year.

Harris Coulter was a medical historian whose four-volume Divided Legacy examined the suppression of empirical and vitalist traditions in Western medicine. Barbara Loe Fisher co-founded Dissatisfied Parents Together in 1982, which became the National Vaccine Information Center. The authors spent years collecting case histories from parents nationwide, analyzing scientific literature dating to the 1940s, attending FDA symposiums, and documenting the financial relationships between vaccine policymakers and manufacturers. Their work was dismissed by establishment figures who labeled concerned parents hysterical and accused journalists covering the story of sensationalism—yet the book’s core findings were never refuted, and many were subsequently confirmed when the United States Claims Court began awarding millions to families whose children had been damaged or killed.

The book appeared at a moment of institutional crisis. In April 1982, WRC-TV journalist Lea Thompson broadcast “DPT: Vaccine Roulette,” the first major American media report documenting vaccine injuries. The medical establishment responded with coordinated counterattack: the American Academy of Pediatrics issued press releases insisting reactions were “coincidental,” the CDC launched talking points, and physicians were urged to testify against parents in injury lawsuits. Vaccine manufacturers began exiting the market—Wyeth in 1984, Connaught limiting distribution—claiming lawsuit costs while lobbying Congress for total immunity from liability. The establishment position held that the vaccine was safe, effective, and essential; that whooping cough would return catastrophically without universal compliance; and that any child who seized or died after a DPT shot would have done so anyway. Coulter and Fisher documented what lay beneath this position: fifty years of ignored warnings in the medical literature, safety tests bearing no relation to human reactions, and officials who privately acknowledged patterns they publicly denied.

A Shot in the Dark belongs to the lineage of work demonstrating that declining mortality from infectious disease preceded and operated independently of vaccination. The full summary unpacks the UCLA-FDA study’s finding that 1 in 875 DPT shots caused either convulsion or collapse; Japan’s development of a safer acellular vaccine in 1981 using American technology while American children continued receiving the crude whole-cell preparation; and the systematic elimination of contraindications by policymakers with undisclosed financial ties to the manufacturers whose products they were evaluating. By January 1990, the United States Claims Court had awarded compensation in 92 vaccine injury cases—more than half for infant deaths whose certificates read “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.”

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