A huge new Danish study finds no link between aluminum in vaccines and childhood injury, including autism

Higher exposure to aluminum in vaccines did not raise the risk that children would develop autism or other disorders, Danish researchers have found.

Based on records from over 1.2 million kids in Denmark over two decades, the researchers reported children who received more aluminum weren’t more likely to be given any of 50 different diagnoses before they turned five.

Because of its size and because the researchers were able to vaccination and healthcare records for individual children, the study offers strong evidence the aluminum in vaccines does not cause illness — at least on the jab schedule used in Denmark, which is somewhat lighter than its American counterpart.

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The study is not perfect.

Anti-vaccine activists immediately attacked it as technically flawed, noting that it lacked “negative controls” — a way to assure its findings were accurate — among other problems. And it doesn’t explain why diagnoses for autism have risen in the last 50 years, particularly in the United States.

Still, the research is well-designed and conducted, and its findings are internally consistent and robust. At a time when the failure of the mRNA Covid jabs has led many parents to question American public health recommendations for all vaccines, it may help quell fears about the dangers of older vaccines for potentially deadly diseases like whooping cough.

The researchers published it last week in Annals of Internal Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal. They work for the Statens Serum Institut, a Danish government agency that oversees vaccination in Denmark.

The SSI is notably more cautious about vaccines than American public health authorities. In September 2022, Denmark became among the first countries to reject Covid vaccines for almost everyone under 50, a step the United States still is nowhere close to taking.

So the paper should help reassure parents about the safety of standard inactivated virus jabs that contain aluminum as an “adjuvant” that will help the immune system respond to the vaccine. To be clear, the study offers no evidence for the safety of mRNA jabs, which do not use aluminum because they cause a massive immune (over)response even without it.

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(Less than 1 is good. Also, that’s a lotta person-years.)

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The paper draws on what scientists call a “natural experiment.”

In this case, the experiment consisted of changes in the Denmark’s vaccine schedule that led to Danish children receiving different amounts of aluminum over time. Because the recommended schedule affected all children, when it changed, the changes broadly affected all children equally. So parental views on vaccination or the health of specific children should not have mattered to the amount of aluminum they got.1

Denmark also has a national healthcare registry with unique patient identifiers for each citizen, and it collects a vast amount of data — more than many Americans would consider acceptable. As the researchers explained:

This registry contains comprehensive information on all births in Denmark, including personal identification numbers for infants and parents, birth date, vital status (that is, dead or alive), maternal smoking during pregnancy, and other infant characteristics. The personal identification number enabled linkage to vaccination records, hospital-recorded diagnoses, and potential confounders at both the child and maternal level…

As a result, the researchers were able to adjust for factors such as maternal smoking, maternal health, and parental income, improving the accuracy of their results.

In 2022, Colorado researchers had found and published a potential signal suggesting a link between aluminum doses and asthma in an American vaccine safety database. But the strength of the Danish research led the lead author on the Colorado paper to call its findings “reassuring.”

Whether anti-vaccine activists will feel similar remains to be seen.