Study Claiming No Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism Riddled with Flaws, Critics Say

This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.

Danish researchers claim they found no link between aluminum in vaccines and 50 negative health outcomes, including autism, asthma and autoimmune disorders. But critics say the study has numerous flaws that misrepresent aluminum’s impact on health.

Mainstream media widely promoted a new study by Danish researchers that found no link between aluminum in vaccines and 50 negative health outcomes, including autism, asthma and autoimmune disorders.

However, critics told The Defender the study used flawed methodology and “statistical tricks” that muddied the findings.

The authors published their report on July 15 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. On July 14, even before the study went live, mainstream and health industry media, including NBC News and STAT News, publicly announced the results.

Chris Exley, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminum exposure, and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said that in order to determine if aluminum exposure is linked to health conditions, the researchers should have compared children with no aluminum exposure to children with aluminum exposure.

But that’s not what the Danish scientists did. Instead, they compared children who received vaccines containing aluminum to children who received vaccines with slightly less aluminum.

Not only that, but there was only a one-milligram difference between the amount of aluminum in the vaccine doses received by the children in one of the groups compared to those in another group. Comparing children with similar aluminum levels rather than comparing children with low levels of aluminum to children with high levels of the metal further muddled the findings, Hooker said.

The researchers examined national vaccination records of about 1.2 million children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018 and tracked the rates of 50 chronic health conditions.

Using statistical analyses, the authors concluded there was no link between aluminum content in vaccines and increased risk of developing autism, autoimmune diseases, asthma or allergic conditions, including food allergies and hay fever.

Anders Hviid, a professor and department head of epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut and lead study author, told MedPage Today, the results “provide robust evidence supporting the safety of childhood vaccines.”

“This is evidence that parents, clinicians, and public health officials need to make the best choices for the health of our children,” Hviid said.

In a press release, Hviid called the results “reassuring” and said large studies like his are important in “an era marked by widespread misinformation about vaccines.”

According to Hviid, the aluminum in vaccines is in the form of aluminum salts, “which is not the same as elemental aluminum which is a metal.” He told NBC News, “It’s really important for parents to understand that we are not injecting metal into children.”

Hviid justified the choice not to include a control group of children with no aluminum exposure by saying there are “very few” children who are “completely unvaccinated.”

The study came out just weeks after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. considered asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee to review vaccines containing aluminum ingredients, according to Reuters.

Aluminum-containing adjuvants are used in many vaccines to create a stronger immune response in the person receiving the shot, according to the CDC. Vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants include DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis), hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), HPV and pneumococcal.

Kennedy previously suggested that aluminum may be partially responsible for the rise in allergies among U.S. kids, according to The New York Times.

J.B. Handley, author of “How to End the Autism Epidemic,” said aluminum in vaccines may trigger autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders by activating the immune system in a way that alters the developing brain of a fetus or child.

This happens because the aluminum in vaccines travels easily to the brain. There, it can cause inflammation in vulnerable people by triggering the production of a key cytokine — interleukin 6 or IL-6 — a protein that affects the immune system. Elevated IL-6 has been linked to autism.

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Is aluminum industry running scared?

The new Danish study affirms that aluminum is safe — a convenient narrative for the aluminum industry and one that has come under greater scrutiny since Kennedy became head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“I spent forty years of academic research on aluminium and I never really believed that I would see the day when the aluminium industry was running scared,” Exley wrote on Substack about the media response to the Danish study. “This is what is happening now.”

Exley said he suspects the aluminum industry influenced the Danish researchers. Hviid pushed back on the claim, telling The Defender he and his co-authors have no financial ties to the aluminum industry.

The study’s authors are employed by the Statens Serum Institut, which has a long history of developing vaccines, Hooker said. “The researchers are integrally involved in pushing vaccines and sweeping vaccine safety under the rug.”

Researchers excluded kids most likely to show early signs of aluminum-related injury

Failing to have a control group with no aluminum exposure was one of several criticisms leveled at the Danish study.

James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., wrote a lengthy Substack post detailing numerous methodological problems. He is president and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, an advocacy group that supports accuracy and integrity in science.

Lyons-Weiler said the study’s authors adjusted for children having aluminum-related chronic illness before 24 months, which meant they removed the kids most likely to show early signs of aluminum-related injury.

He explained how this was a “statistical trick”:

“Imagine studying the association between smoking and lung disease, adjusting for having nicotine-stained fingers, carrying a lighter, or frequency of coughing in the 24 months before lung cancer diagnosis.

“What you are doing, in effect, is mathematically erasing the very signal you are supposed to be detecting.”

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist, noted that over 34,000 children were excluded from the study because they received more than three of any one of the aluminum-containing vaccines before their second birthday. The study described this as an “implausible number of childhood vaccines.”

“Was this a documentation error or a medical error?” Jablonowski asked. “The group had the opportunity to investigate the health of these children and chose not to.”

Recommendations for aluminum-containing vaccines are higher in the U.S. than in Denmark. Before a child turns 2 years old, the U.S. Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule calls for four doses of DTaP, four doses of pneumococcal, three or four doses of Hib, three doses of hepatitis B and one dose of hepatitis A. Other vaccines that don’t contain aluminum are also recommended.

Researchers stopped following kids’ diagnoses at age 5

Hooker cited another flaw in the study: the authors tracked chronic disease diagnoses in children only from ages 2-5. It’s possible some of the kids were older than age 5 when they were diagnosed with a health condition, but by then, researchers were no longer tracking them.

“This is much too young for developmental and autoimmune diagnoses and will cause everything to move to the null hypothesis,” he said.

For example, the number of autistic kids in the study was only about 1 in 500, “which we know is much too low,” Hooker said. Denmark’s autism rate is over four times that amount, according to data from World Population Review.

Additionally, the researchers did nothing to ensure that the kids in the study were exposed to the amounts of aluminum that the authors assumed, based on the kids’ vaccination records.

“There were no biomarkers, no aluminum levels measured in serum, hair or tissue,” Lyons-Weiler told The Defender.

Prior research links aluminum to neurotoxicity, asthma

The results of the new Danish study stand in contrast to the findings of other researchers on aluminum’s negative health impacts, according to Lyons-Weiler.

“The literature contains multiple lines of evidence implicating aluminum adjuvants in neurotoxicity, immune dysregulation and developmental injury,” he said. “The consistency of these findings — across model systems, exposure levels and endpoints — demands attention, not erasure.”

In 2023, a federally funded U.S. study found a 36% higher risk of persistent asthma in children who received three or more milligrams of vaccine-related aluminum than kids who got less than three, but the study’s authors were careful not to suggest a causal relationship.

Exley said he hopes Kennedy will commission independent research that will provide “unequivocal” evidence on aluminum’s role in infant mortality and ill health.

Lyons-Weiler added, “The public deserves studies that test hypotheses honestly, not ones built to produce desired headlines.”

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