Here is an extract from that Vanity Fair article:
Page 86:
IT WAS PRECISELY 8:26p.m. On June 8,2015, when the world began to lose him. The baby boy was only 2 pounds and 12 ounces, nine weeks premature, vulnerable enough to be sent to the neonatal unit at the hospital where he was born, the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England.
For almost all of his short life —one day— he had been stable, sometimes wriggling around in his incubator. That night, though, he stopped breathing. His monitor alarm beeped, alerting the medical staff. "Please don't let my baby die, his mother sobbed. "Please don't let my baby die!" The doctors and nurses compressed his tiny chest, but he showed no response to resuscitation, nor to adrenaline to kick start his heart. The baby's skin color was unusual, a dusky blue, with patches of pink around the abdomen. The medical staff hadn't seen anything like it. He died at 8:58 p.m. His mother had never held him in her arms.
Later that night, the doctors fast-tracked a post mortem examination in the hopes of identifying a cause of death. Specifically, they wanted to know whether an autoimmune disease the baby boy's mother suffered from, that can increase the risk of blood clots, might have passed to him. If so, might it affect his twin sister, who had also been admitted:
But no clear cause of death could be identified. Which made the baby girl's collapse the following night even sarier. She also stopped breathing as her heart rate fell. The same blotches appeared, Unlike her brother, though, the infant responded to resuscitation, and the discoloration vanished.
Over the next four weeks, until the baby girl was discharged, her mother, by then at home, would set alarms through the night tocall the designated NNU parent line, asking the staff to check that the baby was still breathing. She spent every day cuddling her surviving child.
But the NNU was shaken. Staff cried; one doctor took bereavement leave. Despite the obvious vulnerability of sick and premature babies, most of them survive. Only three babies died on the ward in 2014, two in 2O13. A 2021 report shows that for every1,000 premature babies born in the UK each year, 22 die.
When babies suffer cardiorespiratory arrest, there's normally a downward trajectory in their health. Their temperature increases. Their heart rate slows. And there's typically an identifiable cause: heat, infection, or dehydration. But that wasn't the case with the twins.
Even when babies collapse, there's usually a reason, even if if's not obvious at first, and medical intervention usually works. But this baby's collapse was inexplicably sudden and severe, and there was no response. It "didn't fit with any disease process that I have seen, learned, or read about, Ravi Jayaram, a senior doctor on the ward, would say later. As the parents scoured the internet, the medics searched for explanations.
Four days later, another baby at the Countess died. Born at just over 30 weeks gestation, he'd been feisty, wriggling and pulling at his tubes even though he was one of the smallest babies the nursing team had ever seen. Only three days old when he collapsed, he too didnt respond to resuscitation. Doctors were initially unable to install a breathing tube because the back of his throat was so swollen, as was his belly.
One week later, a baby girl, larger, stronger, and gestationally older at 37 weeks, survived only 36 hours at the Countess. She collapsed suddenly, three times, and the same strange rash appeared on her tummy. She died on june 22, the day after Father's Day.
This describes the collapses of Babies A, B, C and D. Baby C was born on the same day that B collapsed and was attacked and died a day later.