An American mother was kept in pretrial detention on Tuesday on charges she suffocated her 18-month-old twins and then tried to blame their deaths on vaccines, US media reported.
Andrea Shaw, 23, claimed that her children suffocated eight days after receiving several childhood vaccines, including for the flu, hepatitis A and tetanus.
Shaw was a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization founded and led by Robert Kennedy Jr. before he joined the Trump administration as health secretary.
Her testimony is central to the lawsuit, which accuses the nation’s largest pediatric society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, of lying about the safety of vaccines recommended for children.
Shaw was arrested and charged after a “lengthy and thorough investigation,” the Payette police department said in the northwestern state of Idaho.
In court Tuesday, her lawyer, Joseph Filicetti, described Shaw as “a caring, loving mother. She’s not what the state’s making her out to be,” the Idaho Statesman newspaper reported.
Shaw — who faces the possibility of the death penalty — asked for her $2 million bond to be reduced, so she could be with the infant girl she gave birth to days before her arrest.
Judge Kiley Stuchlik expressed “concerns” and instead revoked Shaw’s bond, placing her in pretrial detention, according to the Idaho Statesman.
Following the deaths of her children in May 2025, Shaw appeared on a Children’s Health Defense program insisting that she had found them lifeless in their beds.
Health experts have reiterated in recent days that childhood vaccines do not increase the risk of asphyxiation, and questioned whether Shaw’s twins, who were not genetically identical, could have died from immune reactions at the same time.
Kennedy, who has linked vaccination and autism without evidence, has not commented on the case.
Children’s Health Defense did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.