In April 2025, Andrea and Nathaniel Shaw were the young parents of 18-month-old twin toddlers, a boy named Tyson and a girl named Dallas, and living in a mobile home in the small town of Payette, Idaho. The children had received routine vaccinations throughout their short lives, with the most recent ones near the end of the month. By May, the twins were dead. Soon after, law enforcement investigated Andrea because the deaths of her children seemed suspicious.
Shaw and her family had a ready explanation: the twins died due to recent vaccinations. But the indictment a year later, charging her with murder, alleges that she suffocated the children in a premeditated act. This alleged crime could make her eligible for the death penalty. Meanwhile, the largest anti-vaccine group in the nation rose to her defense, turning her into a martyr and a kind of celebrity in the movement.
Shaw was indicted on June 29 and taken into custody in Payette shortly thereafter, just five days after she gave birth again via C-section to a baby girl. Initially, she was held on a $2 million bond and ordered to have no contact with children under the age of 18. On Tuesday, July 14, a judge in Idaho’s third judicial district revoked her bond entirely, arguing that if she were to be released while awaiting trial, she could pose a threat to her newborn.
The case has already generated nationwide press coverage and offers an unusually detailed look at how the anti-vaccine movement recruits parents and then uses those parents to market its claims to the public. Less than a week after their twin toddlers were discovered lifeless in bed, Andrea and Nathaniel sat for an interview with Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine organization previously chaired by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They appear to have been connected with CHD via another anti-vaccine activist, registered nurse Angela Marie Wulbrecht, who, according to court documents and public comments she’s given, got involved in the case just days after the twins died.
“Over the past year, I have had the privilege of walking alongside Andrea and her family after the unimaginable loss of her twin babies,” Wulbrecht told Children’s Health Defense in an article about Shaw’s charges published on July 1. “I have witnessed a mother’s profound grief, unwavering love for her children, and determination to seek answers.”
(Wulbrecht did not respond to requests for comment.)
Children’s Health Defense has seized on Shaw’s case as an opportunity to promote anti-vaccine beliefs, specifically the false notion that children’s routine vaccines cause babies to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, not to mention broader suspicions about the medical establishment. Mary Holland, CHD’s CEO and general counsel, tweeted recently that Shaw, “isn’t the first parent whose vaccine concerns were dismissed—and treated as a suspect instead. CHD is standing with her family as this case moves forward.” Holland and the articles that CHD has published about the case have implied that Shaw is being attacked by a corrupt system for suggesting that vaccines harmed her children. And they’ve made it clear that they will treat her case as a major test of whether the legal system and medical establishment take their claims seriously.
Other like-minded activists have done the same, including tech multimillionaire Steve Kirsch, who now runs the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, an anti-vaccine group that Wulbrecht is affiliated with. “This may be the best reason for not vaccinating your kids,” Kirsch commented on X, sharing a story from CHD’s website on Shaw’s case, “to avoid being charged with first-degree murder.”
“This may be the best reason for not vaccinating your kids, to avoid being charged with first-degree murder.”
CHD has energetically defended Shaw both before and after she was charged. Holland sat for a July 8 interview about Shaw with MAHA Action, a 501(c)4 advocacy group staffed by some RFK Jr.’s closest political allies. There, Holland was interviewed by Tony Lyons, the founder of Kennedy’s publisher, Skyhorse Publishing. And she pressed Shaw’s case in a New York Times article about the lawsuit, where she declared, “We’re probably the only organization that would take a case like that very seriously and put out information about it right away.”
“Twins,” Holland added in another tweet, “don’t just die.”
In May 2025, just days after the twins died, the Shaws, both blond and in their early 20s, appeared on CHD-TV, the organization’s streaming platform, which shows both anti-vaccine content (“The Unvaccinated Immune System” was a recent broadcast) as well as more general conspiracy theorizing (“Epstein and the New World Order.”) British anti-vaccine activist Polly Tommey gently led them through a round of questioning, tracing their experience from Shaw’s pregnancy, which Andrea said was “a struggle,” though the events before the childrens’ deaths.
Andrea said she’d gone into pre-term labor at just 29 weeks. Dallas and Tyson, born via emergency C-section, had underdeveloped lungs, and Dallas also had a heart murmur. They were taken to the NICU, where Andrea posted photos of them on Snapchat, tiny under a mound of medical equipment, one wearing a diaper that read “preemie strong.” The twins spent 77 days in intensive care, and while there, were given a Hepatitis B vaccine.
Although Andrea hadn’t been recently vaccinated, she told Tommey that she and Nathaniel did not consider themselves to be anti-vaccine, although she acknowledged that the couple had “said no to a few vaccines” for the babies after they were born. She explained they did so “because I would do my research before I would give consent.”
In January 2025, when the twins were three months old, they were finally released and went home, and for the next year and a half, they apparently thrived, Andrea told Tommey, albeit a bit delayed following their premature birth. “They ate fine; they learned to roll around and crawl just fine,” she said, adding that the babies visited a doctor for monthly checkups and received routine vaccinations at 12 months.
On April 23, 2025, at their 18-month appointment, the children received Hepatitis A, DTaP, and flu shots. Andrea said that both she and her mother-in-law, Wendy Marie Shaw, who was present at the appointment, expressed concern about the flu shot. Andrea told Tommey that Wendy had told a nurse that Nathaniel’s side of the family “all have bad reactions or are allergic” to it, and that the family usually opted for nasal vaccines.
According to an affidavit Wendy later filed in court, “[the nurse] became visibly irritated with us because we kept asking about the flu shot and objecting to that vaccine,” Wendy wrote. “In speaking with Andrea, [I] found that Andrea ultimately agreed to allow the flu shot as well as the other shots provided that day.”
While adverse reactions to any vaccine are rare but possible, flu shots are proven to reduce illness and death in babies and children. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has recently stoked suspicion about them, saying in January that it would be a “better thing” if fewer kids got them. Flu shots are one of several childhood vaccines that the CDC under the Trump administration no longer routinely recommends.
After the appointment, Andrea told Tommey, “They were just as normal. Perfect, happy, little babies.” That night, the children seemed tired, but otherwise things were “business as usual.”
The day after the vaccines, when Nathaniel had already been at work for a few hours, Andrea said Tyson walked into the living room “and just laid down and wouldn’t get up.” Dallas “ran to me,” Andrea recalled, and seemed especially clingy. When she changed Dallas’ diaper, Andrea said, “I noticed that the typical toddler potbelly was gone,” implying that the baby had lost a significant amount of weight overnight; she said the same was true of Tyson when she went to change his diaper. Both babies had blue-tinged lips, she said, and green diarrhea.
Andrea told Tommey she called Wendy for advice, tried to get hold of Nathaniel at work, and then video-called her own mother. “I was going crazy a bit,” Andrea said. “They didn’t look right.” Both her mother and mother-in-law, she said, agreed that the babies “looked like they were dying.” Wendy rushed over to drive the twins and Andrea to the hospital, she wrote in her recent affidavit, and agreed that the twins looked very ill, “Their lips were blue and appeared sealed shut, their eyes were sunken, and their toddler bellies were gone.” When Nathaniel finally returned home — it was unclear from the interview when in this sequence of events he arrived — he also expressed alarm at the children’s appearance and at how rapidly they both had apparently changed.
At the emergency room, a doctor examined the twins and, Andrea and Wendy both say, told them they could be having what Andrea called a “bad reaction” to their vaccinations. The children were given Tylenol and popsicles, and when they were able to keep those down, were sent home.
Throughout the next week, Andrea said, the babies wouldn’t eat, had diarrhea, and Tyson threw up “a couple of times.” Wendy also said in her affidavit that the twins seemed to be unwell when she saw them a few times over that week. “Their coloring was off,” she wrote, and both had low energy.
Andrea told Tommey she called their pediatrician for another appointment, but was told there was no time for walk-in patients, and instead, she should feed them a gentle BRAT—bananas, rice, applesauce, toast—diet. She recalled in her interview with Tommey that the children seemed to be improving later that week, drinking from their sippy cups and appearing to be more energetic, with only what she called “severe diarrhea” remaining.
But in her affidavit, Wendy claimed that the twins still seemed off on April 30, 2025, a week after they had been vaccinated, when the family went to a cousin’s recital together and then to McDonald’s afterwards. “The twins each ate a few French fries and would not touch anything else,” she wrote. “That was very unusual behavior for them.”
Andrea recounted putting them to bed that night, and then on Thursday, May 1, hours after Nathaniel left for work, she said she awoke to silence, which was unusual. She peeked in the babies’ bedroom to see them lying still on their stomachs, and, assuming they were still asleep, went to clean up the house. When she eventually went to wake them, the twins were dead. She affirmed, in response to questions from Tommey, that they were cold and “looked like they had gone in their sleep.” Her face was calm as she spoke. She said she first flipped over Tyson, then Dallas, and called 911. The police arrived, along with medical personnel.
“I was telling them my truth, and they were getting into my head that I had done it. And I know I hadn’t.”
“It was just straight to interrogation,” Nathaniel told Tommey. The police, he added, “were just very adamant that we had done it.”
Andrea said that the police told her that “it wasn’t medical. And that they figured asphyxiation, and that I had supposedly had a postpartum overwhelming blackout, and done it to my children.” Andrea continued that the interaction with law enforcement made her feel “crazy.” Especially since “I was telling them my truth, and they were getting into my head that I had done it. And I know I hadn’t.”
Tommey praised the couple for sitting down for an interview within days of their children’s deaths, and then pressed what seemed to be her most important point. “You’re so pro-vaccine,” Tommey claimed, despite Andrea saying that the family had declined some. “How does that make you both feel that this has happened, that you were lied to?”
Andrea replied without hesitating: “I feel that I wish I was anti-vaccine now.”
When reached for comment, Wendy, declined to discuss the charges against her daughter-in-law, but she referred me to Andrea’s lawyer, Joseph Filicetti.
“Absolutely, she’s not guilty,” Filicetti told me in a phone call last week. “And she’s going to be pleading as such.” He was outraged that she’d been arrested so soon after the birth of her new child. As she sat in jail, he said, she was unable to heal properly from her C-Section or breastfeed the baby, who is now in Nathaniel Shaw’s custody.
Filicetti declined to detail what he will argue in Shaw’s defense or which vaccine they will claim was responsible for the twins’ death. Although, given what has been outlined in the Children’s Health Defense interview and affidavits, the defense will likely claim that the culprit was the flu vaccine.
“They didn’t disclose to us what their theory was. We’ll wait until trial to disclose ours,” he said, referring to prosecutors. “I’m not trying this case in the media. I’m going to try this case in the courtroom.”
Filicetti also made it clear that questioning vaccine safety could constitute part of her defense. “I don’t think vaccines are all safe and effective,” he asserted. He pointed to the Covid vaccine as a potential outlier, given the brief period of testing and study, and concluded, “If you look at any of the real-world data, they were neither safe nor effective.” (The reality is that mRNA Covid vaccines were able to be quickly developed to meet the medical emergency because there had been decades of research on mRNA technology. Large global studies of Covid vaccines continue to confirm that they prevent severe illness and death, and don’t increase the risk of other serious health problems, like cancer or heart disease.)
“We’ll move heaven and earth to make sure she’s found not guilty, I promise you.”
“My clients were pro-vaccine prior,” Filicetti added, referring to the Shaws, but noted that because of the allegedly “adverse reaction” the twins had suffered, their views had changed. “It would change anyone’s view,” he said. “We’ll move heaven and earth to make sure she’s found not guilty, I promise you.”
Days after the twins died, a friend opened a now-deleted fundraiser for the Shaws on GiveSendGo, a Christian fundraising platform, asking for money to help obtain “an independent autopsy and legal counsel to get the answers they desperately want and deserve.” The target amount was $50,000.
CHD soon got involved in that too. During the Shaws’ interview, as the children’s bodies lay in a funeral home, Tommey told the audience that the organization was “trying to get tissue samples to help” with the autopsy.
Wendy also referred me to the anti-vaccine activist and nurse Angela Marie Wulbrecht, whom she said had been with the family “since day one.” In an affidavit she filed with the court on July 14 to ask for Andrea’s $2 million bond to be reduced, Wulbrecht wrote that she had learned about the twins’ deaths, presumably from news stories about the case circulating online. She then wrote to Andrea to “offer to assist the family in obtaining an independent private autopsy.” Wulbrecht had been in contact with Dr. Ryan Cole, an Idaho pathologist and vocal Covid vaccine skeptic who has served on the state’s largest public health district board. Cole told Wulbrecht, she wrote, that the “condition of the tissue” meant that such an autopsy was no longer possible.
Wulbrecht has said that she was injured by a Covid vaccine in 2021, developing fatigue, brain fog, trouble with her balance and other symptoms. She then was featured in a Children’s Health Defense article about people who haven’t received compensation from any federal programs for vaccine injuries they say they experienced. Initially, Wulbrecht told Kaiser Health News, despite her own experience, she still supported the Covid vaccine campaign. Since then, however, her views seem to have shifted. According to her bio with the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, Wulbrecht is “deeply committed to researching and addressing the adverse effects of vaccines,” and hosts webinars with Kirsch “to educate the public on the dangers of these vaccines.”
She’s also posted a photo of herself in 2022 hobnobbing at a celebration of some kind with Kennedy. The photo was accompanied by text encouraging her followers to read The Real Anthony Fauci, a screed by RFK Jr. excoriating immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advised President Trump during the start of the Covid pandemic and soon became enemy number 1 in the eyes of the anti-vaccine movement. Wulbrecht’s caption added, “Tomorrow they are voting for the Covid vaccines to be on the childhood schedule. Once it’s on the schedule, they are free from liability, which is their goal.”
Wulbrecht soon became deeply involved not just in the case but in the Shaw’s lives. According to her affidavit, Shaw also relied heavily on her for medical advice throughout her next pregnancy after the twins died: “She regularly sent me copies of ultrasound reports, genetic testing, medical records, and physician notes so that I could help her better understand the information she had been given.”
This seems to have happened in an especially fraught time for the family; a footnote in a lawsuit later filed by CHD says that the Shaw family “received death threats and was forced to relocate” to Boise after the police “implied wrongdoing.”
In court documents filed on July 14, Michael Duke, the Payette County Prosecuting Attorney, wrote that the evidence all pointed to Andrea having suffocated the twins. (East Idaho journalist Nate Eaton was the first to report on the July 14 court documents.) Detectives investigated other options, prosecutors wrote, noting that the twins’ room “would get extraordinarily hot,” over 100 degrees, leading to initial concerns that they might have died from heat exposure. They discounted that theory, however, because Shaw said that the heat in the room was “routine,” meaning, prosecutors wrote, “the children survived this circumstance every night prior to the night of their death.” Furthermore, they added, “the time of death did not correlate with the time of day the room reached over 100 degrees.”
Police also investigated whether vaccines could have played a role in the twins’ deaths, prosecutors wrote, but a forensic pathologist and three doctors with whom they consulted rejected that as unlikely.
As an aside, the prosecution alleged that one twin “had diarrhea and tested positive for rotavirus, which is a common side effect of vaccinations.” This is strange wording; vaccines can cause mild, short-term vomiting, fever, or diarrhea, but they do not cause rotavirus, which, as the name suggests, is a virus common in young children, caused by hand-to-mouth contact with an infected person’s feces.
Detectives also noted that under questioning Andrea had “changed her story several times” about when she last saw the twins alive. Ultimately, prosecutor Duke wrote, detectives concluded that Andrea had suffocated the children, who had “pulmonary vascular congestion,” in addition to Tyson having pulmonary edema.
“According to our expert, these symptoms are consistent with being smothered,” he added. He asked for her bond not to be reduced, arguing that given that she is accused of murdering her children, the consequences of her being allowed contact with her newborn “cannot be remedied if she were to reoffend.”
After the twins’ deaths, Andrea changed her online bios to read “Bereaved Mama and Homemaker,” and shared many quotes on Facebook about grief, all of which have since been deleted or made private. For Wendy, the deaths appear to have stoked an intense distrust in vaccines and in the medical system generally. In the months after they passed, she posted a series of stories about vaccines being unsafe.
“So true,” she commented, sharing a link to an article claiming that vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome. “Please take a look.” There is no proven connection between vaccines and SIDS. A meta-analysis actually appears to show that vaccines decrease the overall risk of SIDS.
This is a turn of events that Children’s Health Defense welcomes and encourages. CHD has a history of swooping in after the loss of a child to quickly interview bereaved families and assure them that their worst suspicions about vaccines are accurate. When a Mennonite child died of measles during a 2025 Texas outbreak, her parents were soon booked on CHD TV. The organization baselessly claimed that the girl had died because of a hospital error, not measles. The organization attributed the death of a second unvaccinated child to hospital-acquired pneumonia. But according to state health officials, the girl died of “measles pulmonary failure.” Measles can cause serious respiratory and neurologic complications, including pneumonia; the vaccine is highly effective at preventing the disease.
“That’s how CHD works,” says Dr. Paul Offit, the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a frequent target of CHD’s ire. “It’s the same story with them over and over again. They have a fixed, immutable, science-resistant belief that vaccines are doing harm.”
“That’s how CHD works. It’s the same story with them over and over again. They have a fixed, immutable, science-resistant belief that vaccines are doing harm.”
Even before Children’s Health Defense existed, the anti-vaccine movement had vehemently defended parents accused of killing their children, sometimes aided in their efforts by shaky science or faults with a murder case. One of the more infamous was Alan Yurko, a Florida father convicted in 1999 of shaking his 10-week-old infant son to death. He was sentenced to life in prison. Yurko argued that vaccines had caused the baby’s death, and anti-vaccine organizations amplified his arguments. His is one of several cases where the anti-vaccine movement has argued that allegations of fatal abuse are used to cover up vaccine injury.
“This is not just about one family’s injustice,” Yurko wrote in a 2002 letter to the Idaho Observer from prison, which was then republished by Vaccine Truth, a site run by Wendy Callahan, a Florida anti-vaccine activist. Yurko added, “It is about hundreds of families who have and will experience such tragedy.”
“This is not just about one family’s injustice. It is about hundreds of families who have and will experience such tragedy.”
It ultimately became clear that Yurko’s conviction was based on a profoundly botched autopsy. The medical examiner who conducted it was ultimately banned from performing autopsies and would have been fired were he not about to retire. Yurko was ultimately freed from prison and pleaded no contest to his son’s death to avoid a retrial. His case continues to be cited in the anti-vaccine and health freedom movement as an example of the ways that the medical system doesn’t take their concerns seriously, even though the baby’s death was never attributed to vaccines.
It’s unclear how CHD chose to name Andrea Shaw as its lead plaintiff, or what due diligence they may have done before to ascertain that her children’s deaths were caused by vaccine administration. (The organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Mother Jones.) Shaw is joined as a plaintiff by two other parents who say their children died or were injured from vaccines, as well as three doctors who lost their medical licenses, which they allege was because they didn’t follow AAP vaccine guidelines.
The suit stretches the bounds of logic in several key ways, says Dorit Reiss. She’s a professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s law school who specializes in vaccine law and policy.
Reiss has argued that the suit “makes claims that are as legally spurious as they are factually unsound.” For one thing, she says, it fails to make a case that the AAP was engaged in “racketeering”—an illegal business scheme that multiple parties engage in together for profit. The closest the lawsuit comes is to claim AAP and medical experts make “false and misleading statements transmitted through pediatric offices to parents to maintain vaccine uptake despite the absence of required safety evidence.”
“They’re building it all around a parallel to tobacco, but the parallel is a very weak one,” Reiss explains. “Unlike tobacco or a mob case, they haven’t shown us a real conspiracy.” She said the suit “should be thrown out,” adding, “I’m surprised it’s taken so long” to do so.
The suit contains other glaring errors. Dr. Paul Offit is not a defendant in the lawsuit but is named throughout as having made statements about the safety of vaccines. The suit falsely claims that he is “a leading spokesperson” for the AAP and serves on its Committee on Infectious Diseases, neither of which is true. “I don’t speak on behalf of the AAP,” Offit says, “and I’m not a member of the AAP’s Committee on Infectious Diseases.”
Reiss says it is also unlikely CHD’s racketeering lawsuit will be dropped because its lead plaintiff is now charged with murder. Shaw hasn’t been removed from the case, and if she were, there are still other plaintiffs involved. She also expressed caution about assuming anything about the Shaw murder case before it goes to trial.
“People are sometimes accused falsely,” she said. “Until we see the evidence at trial, we don’t really know what they have that suggests that this mother suffocated her children.”
Like Offit, though, she’s also not surprised that anti-vaccine groups have resorted to conspiracy theories to explain Shaw’s prosecution. “These people live in an alternate reality,” she says. “In their reality, everyone is part of a grand conspiracy against them.”
