Study finds no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism, asthma
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Aluminum in childhood vaccines is a target of vaccine skeptics, who blame the ingredient on myriad health concerns. But a study of more than 1 million people, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found no link between aluminum in vaccines and an increased risk of 50 chronic conditions, including autoimmune diseases, allergies and autism.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread vaccine misinformation for years, said on a podcast in 2024 that aluminum in vaccines is "extremely neurotoxic." (An HHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Senior study author Anders Hviid said that, as a parent, he understood the concerns about vaccine safety.
"Our study addresses many of these concerns and provides clear and robust evidence for the safety of childhood vaccines. This is evidence that parents need to make the best choices for the health of their children," said Hviid, who is a professor and the head of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institut, a sector of the Danish Ministry of Health focused on combating and preventing infectious diseases.
Hviid and his team used Denmark's nationwide registry to look for any connections between aluminum exposure from childhood vaccines and 50 chronic disorders, including 36 autoimmune disorders, nine allergy or asthma conditions, and five neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and ADHD.
The study looked at more than 1.2 million people born in Denmark from 1997 through 2018 and followed them until the end of 2020. Because health records in Denmark are meticulously kept by government agencies, the researchers were also able to compare children who received more aluminum in their vaccines by age 2 compared those who received less. The study didn't include unvaccinated children.
The researchers found no link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and any of the 50 conditions.
Ross Kedl, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said Scandinavian public health studies are of uniquely good quality.
"[This excellence is] partly because they have, for a long time, had such a unified health system," said Kedl, who wasn't involved with the new study. "Everyone is tracked for life from birth and you can go back for many years and ask, 'Can we find a link between something that happened in the past and in the future?'"
Hviid said the catalyst for the Danish study was a widely criticized Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded study, published in 2022, that suggested a link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and increased asthma risk. The study, however, didn't distinguish between aluminum from vaccines and aluminum from other sources. It also contained inconsistencies: for example, in one group the researchers analyzed, more aluminum exposure wasn't linked to increased asthma risk, contrary to the study's conclusions.
"If you are looking at people who got vaccines that contained aluminum versus those who had fewer, you have to control for confounding factors, you need to know that the only different source of aluminum these people received was from those vaccines," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
The CDC study was not able to do that, Offit said. Aluminum is the third-most abundant metal on Earth and people are exposed to the metal through breast milk, air and water, he said.
"Aluminum is part of our daily diet and has been since the beginning of time. That is the point people don't understand," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Neither Osterholm nor Offit were involved with the new study.
CDC officials said at the time that it appears that aluminum-containing vaccines "do not account for the overall trends that we see."
Osterholm said the strength of the broader research is that it piles on dozens of studies that have drawn the same conclusion as the new study.
"One study does not make for a safe vaccine supply or not," he said. "It's the accumulative data that comes from many studies that have been done, that together demonstrate the safety of vaccines."
Why is aluminum in vaccines?
Different ingredients are added to vaccines for different reasons. Aluminum — added to vaccines as aluminum salts — is what's known as an adjuvant. These additives act as a beacon for the immune system, pointing out invaders and prompting the body to produce antibodies against an antigen, or the virus or bacteria a vaccine aims to protect against.
"You can't just have an antigen and have an immune response, you need some kind of stimulus to trigger that response," said Kedl, of the University of Colorado. "An adjuvant is a substance that alerts the body's immune response to the vaccine's antigen. Without adjuvants, you actually create tolerance, which is the opposite effect of what you want a vaccine to do."
In the U.S., aluminum salts are used in the vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP) as well as vaccines for pneumonia, HPV and hepatitis B.
"The aluminum that is in vaccines is in the form of extremely small amounts of aluminum salts which is not the same as elemental aluminum which is a metal," Hviid said. "It's really important for parents to understand that we are not injecting metal into children."
Aluminum salts from vaccines are injected into the muscle and most are cleared away by the body and filtered out through the kidneys within two weeks, though small amounts can linger for years.
"The aluminum-containing vaccines form the backbone of our childhood immunization programs," Hviid said, adding that there are currently no viable replacements. "It is critically important that we keep politics and science apart in this issue. If not, it is the children, including U.S. children, who are going to suffer the consequences."
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And yet we were inundated with stories about the risks of aluminum cookware in the 1980s. That was based upon research from the 1960s and 1970s that suggested a link between aluminum leeching into foods and Alzheimer's disease. There was a marked shift away from use of aluminum in cookware to steel, stainless steel, or glass because of those medical concerns.
Today the general health consensus is that the research linking aluminum to Alzheimer's disease is inconclusive. So, can aluminum affect brain health? Maybe yes and maybe no.
The World Health Organization lists aluminum as a food contaminant. The Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) has established a Provisional Tolerable Weekly Intake (PTWI) for aluminum of 2 mg/kg body weight, acknowledging that aluminum compounds can impact the reproductive system and developing nervous system at lower doses than previously believed.
Which experts are we supposed to believe?
Not this one.
I’m not a chemist, but I read a little, so take this with a grain of salt if you like. Or a mg of salt per kg of body weight if you prefer.
So the study you linked is talking about consuming something like 50-75mg of aluminum citrate per kg of body weight, and doing it over a period of time. In other words, you’d have to be eating it, not cooking on it. And, it’s a specific form of aluminum.
And even then, you’d need to be eating grams of it per day for a long time before it became a problem. Also, the study is talking about aluminum citrate, which is a form of aluminum used in antacids or basically filler in vitamins. It’s not part of your cookware. Also, a given amount of aluminum citrate doesn’t necessarily tell us how much molecular aluminum is present, but it’s going to be a smaller number than 50 or 75mg.
In vaccines, they use different forms of aluminum - aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate, e.g. The amount in a vaccine is something like 0.25 or 0.5mg of one of these aluminum salts - or 1/100th the amount mentioned in your study. And even then, it’s a different compound, and you’re getting it verrrry occasionally.
So apple and oranges doesn’t begin to cover how different this is.
That doesn't alter the expert advice to avoid aluminum cookware in the 1980s. The Alzheimer's scare back then was just as real as the BPA scare today. (And BPA was used to coat the inside of aluminum cans to protect against corrosion.) Today's scientists can only claim that new experimental results linking aluminum and Alzheimer's disease are inconclusive. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Yes, the amount of aluminum contained in a single vaccine should be safe. But how many vaccines are given to infants? Part of the concern over health risks of vaccines are driven by the number of vaccinations given in a single session. So, that 0.5 mg can multiply with the number of different vaccines administered. An infant could potential be exposed to 3 to 4 mg of aluminum in a single vaccination session.
That cumulative effect wouldn't be apples and oranges to an environmental chemist. Environmental chemists would not obscure the effects of multiple exposures. Why else would EPA, NIH, and WHO issue mild warnings over exposure to aluminum? Does this have something to do with who profits by exposing infants to aluminum versus who profits by protecting infants from aluminum exposure? Do we need to follow the money?
Before freaking out, you need to know the specific compound you are talking about, and how the body processes it - or just passes it. You also need to know the dosage. A mg of aluminum phosphate might have like 0.2mg of molecular aluminum in it. The dosage determines the poison.
Well, that's true, of course. But the experts touting the safety of vaccines often attempt to obscure rather than explain. For instance, comparing amounts of aluminum ingested with breast milk to directly injected aluminum. Citing those completely unrelated pathways can only be intended to deliberately obscure. Another favorite smokescreen is to cite study results over the first year of life. But an infant is most vulnerable during the first few months when rapid development and growth are occurring. Citing results over a longer period obscures the risks and deliberately misleads about safety during the most vulnerable stage of development.
My experience is with environmental chemistry. And that experience rings alarms and flashes red lights whenever I see some of these 'reassurances' by medical experts. I've seen polluters pull the same sort of stunts. Yeah, the science can be trusted. It's the scientists who are questionable.
Remember when they injected rats with copious amounts of Styrofoam and it caused cancer?
The living ones that now claim it's the Teflon we ingest that increases the risk of Alzheimer's.
( Two strikes Mom, even though you are 93 and sharp a s a tack )