A mother in Idaho who said her twin toddlers died after getting routine vaccinations has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of murder, with authorities alleging she suffocated her children.
She is being held in jail on a $2 million bond after a grand-jury indictment. Shaw’s defense attorney, Joseph Filicetti, has filed a motion requesting the court reduce her bond to $100,000. If (PEXEL)
After her twins’ death in May 2025, Andrea Renee Shaw, 23 years old, became a vocal antivaxer, and told the Children’s Health Defense, the antivaccine nonprofit founded by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that she believed the shots were to blame.
She eventually became a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, alleging it participated in a fraudulent scheme with major vaccine manufacturers to mislead the public about the safety of childhood vaccines. The lawsuit suggests that Shaw’s twins died because of a severe reaction to vaccinations they had received eight days prior.
“I wish I had checked on them more,” she said around the time of their death in a video interview with Children’s Health Defense. She described finding twins Dallas and Tyson cold and lifeless in the same bed together, showing signs of rigor mortis. “They looked as if they had gone in their sleep,” she said.
Last week, Shaw was arrested and charged with her children’s murder. The indictment claims she killed her 18-month-old son and daughter by suffocating them “with premeditation and with malice aforethought,” or by aggravated battery.
She is being held in jail on a $2 million bond after a grand-jury indictment. Shaw’s defense attorney, Joseph Filicetti, has filed a motion requesting the court reduce her bond to $100,000. If found guilty, Shaw faces the potential of life in prison or the death penalty. Her next court date is July 14.
The arrest followed a “lengthy and thorough investigation” by the Payette Police Department, Chief Gary Marshall said. A department spokesperson declined to comment further.
Shaw said in her interview with Children’s Health Defense that local police had accused her of having a “postpartum blackout” that led her to kill her children.
Filicetti, reached by phone Wednesday, said his client was innocent. “Our explanation would be the vaccines, and that’s what our experts are going to testify to,” he said.
Mary Holland, the chief executive of Children’s Health Defense, said Shaw had tried to warn her pediatrician about a family history of adverse reactions to the flu vaccine. “All parents deserve to be heard when they raise vaccine safety concerns,” she said.
The twins had received vaccines for hepatitis A, influenza, and DTaP, which includes diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccines, during their 18-month wellness visit at their pediatrician’s office in April 2025, according to the civil suit. Those vaccines have substantial evidence for safety in scientific literature, including when administered separately or together.
“No vaccines given to children have been shown to cause suffocation,” said Dr. Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who isn’t involved with the nonprofit’s lawsuit or Shaw’s criminal case.
In the Children’s Health Defense lawsuit, Shaw says she brought her twins to a local hospital the day after they were vaccinated. The twins developed severe symptoms, including blue lips, lethargy, diarrhea, and sunken eyes, according to the civil suit. The treating emergency-room physician documented their diagnosis as a “post-immunization reaction,” the court documents said. The twins died about a week later.
Filicetti said the Children’s Health Defense isn’t financially supporting Shaw’s defense against the state and that he didn’t yet know whether he would call on experts with the organization. The defense’s experts will include doctors who are “familiar with vaccine reactions,” he said.
The chief executive of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the organization being sued by the antivaccine nonprofit, said it has asked the court to dismiss the civil suit.
It is the nonprofit’s latest campaign to target “pediatricians and the AAP’s use of science-based evidence in vaccine recommendations,” said Mark Del Monte, the CEO. It makes claims “that have no grounding in reality,” he said.
