Are Aluminum Adjuvants Safe in Vaccines?

As we reported in Paleo Family, vaccine manufacturers have been using aluminum in vaccines for decades, but they’ve been doing so without clear data of its safety:

Apart from the side effects listed on the safety inserts of each vaccine and those that warranted payouts by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, there is mounting evidence that some portion of the population may be susceptible to toxicity from vaccine adjuvants or preservatives such as aluminum a known neurotoxin.

Aluminum is used in several vaccines to increase the effectiveness and in some cases it is an essential ingredient that actually causes the immune response. Without it, the vaccine would not “work” as intended.

Are Aluminum Adjuvants Safe?

But as of the time of this writing, there have been no known studies to demonstrate the maximum level of aluminum safely injected through vaccines.

There was a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at aluminum in intravenous feeding solutions for premature babies.

That study found that 5 micrograms of aluminum per 5 kilograms of body weight per day was safe but much more of the metal led to neurological damage.

There have not been any studies done on IV feeding solutions or vaccines for healthy babies but the FDA did set a limit on injectables at 25 micrograms.

Despite this, the CDC vaccine schedule includes a shot of hepatitis B vaccine for babies in their first 24 hours.

There are two options for pediatric hepatitis B vaccine and both include 250 micrograms of aluminum—10 times the FDA limit for injectables. This is repeated a month later, and when the infant returns for her 2-month checkup, she could possibly be injected with an astounding 1,225 micrograms of aluminum, which is repeated for the 4- and 6-month shots.

Dietary aluminum doesn’t seem to be a problem and babies can even filter out IV aluminum relatively efficiently, but the reaction to aluminum salts in intramuscular vaccine shots in particular poses a more serious threat. A 2015 study in Frontiers in Neurology explained the biological process that IM aluminum goes through. Once injected, aluminum is consumed by immune cells (a process called phagocytosis) and persists in phagocytic cells throughout the body, slowly accumulating in brain. The data show that IM aluminum in particular presents this risk. Vaccines contain aluminum specifically for its ability to stick around in the body and for its effectiveness in creating an immune response. The problem is that the entire immune response was never accounted for and the adjuvant–a known neurotoxin–often ends up collected in the recipient’s brain.

Dr. Shaw has conducted research on aluminum, mimicking the amount of aluminum adjuvants used in childhood vaccines into mice. “We were quite surprised to see how rapidly the behavioral symptoms emerged. They showed not only behavioral deficits in motor function but cognitive deficits as well. And once we sacrificed the animal and started looking at their brains and spinal cords, we saw massive damage to their motor neurons.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzdliixnmI

As Vaccine Papers summarizes:

[Macrophages (MFs)] eat Al adjuvant nanoparticles, MFs cross the [blood brain barrier] and MFs transport nanoparticles into the brain. All these steps have been experimentally demonstrated multiple times. And the entire process has been demonstrated with [aluminum adjuvant nanoparticles] AANs in mice. AANs from an intramuscular injection were “photographed” in the brain by PIXE. Additionally, vaccine-relevant dosages of Al adjuvant increased brain Al content by 50X. These facts contradict the simplistic and wrong belief (preferred by vaccine promoters) that AAN toxicity is determined by the concentration of dissolved aluminum ions in the blood. The story is far more complicated and worrisome than that. The toxicity of aluminum adjuvant depends on the transport of Al adjuvant nanoparticles by macrophages.

But is that a problem?

A study published in 2008 from SUNY-Stony Brook compared children who received the triple Hepatitis B vaccine series to those who had not, indicates that it is absolutely a problem.

The results were published in Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry and were quite alarming: boys who had received the full, recommended Hepatitis B vaccine series were nine times more likely to need special education than boys who did not receive a single dose of the vaccine. Furthermore, the same researchers found that premature boys who received the hepatitis B vaccine had a threefold increase in autism diagnoses. Working backwards, researchers including Dr. Chris Exely in Britain have found that people with autism have much higher levels of aluminum in their brains.

Again, (just to reiterate the point) there have been no documented scientific studies demonstrating the safety of the levels of aluminum found in vaccines, yet drug manufacturers and physicians plow through with more vaccines including the adjuvant.  Why? How could safety regulators be so seemingly ambivalent toward an ingredient in vaccines when there is good evidence that high amounts can be dangerous to humans?

CDC ACIP Addresses Aluminum in Vaccines (Kinda)

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) holds regular meetings in which experts are gathered to scrutinize new vaccines and approve/disapprove them. In the February 2018 meeting, a particularly chilling exchange occurred in which a panelist asked if there was any comment about using multiple aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines at the same time.

The response was, “We have no data to make a recommendation one way or the other.”

Amanda Cohn, Deputy Director of Immunization Services at the CDC added that the general approach to immunization is that, “they can be given at the same time in different limbs.”

So, we have a known neurotoxin that has an FDA-imposed limit for injectibles and which current vaccines exceed dramatically, which is crucial for the efficacy of the vaccine, and which has been shown to be carried to the brain from wherever the injection site is, but that it’s okay to load up on it as long as the shots are given in different limbs (which doesn’t happen in any case).

MTHFR Gene

The common response to concerns over aluminum is that aluminum salts are easily metabolized and filtered out of the body “whether injected or ingested”, but this is clearly not true. If it were true, then vaccine manufacturers wouldn’t include them in their vaccines. The point of an adjuvant is to increase the immune response not to be easily filtered out of the body. This may be particularly dangerous in people with the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) gene mutation may have trouble expelling toxins:

Individuals with low activity of the MTHFR enzyme may present with elevated homocysteine levels, which have been associated with inflammation and heart disease, birth defects, difficult pregnancies, and potentially an impaired ability to detoxify.

It’s not clear what percentage of the population has this condition, but it is clear that they are more susceptible to injected neurotoxins.

Injection Versus Ingestion

Some will claim that it’s no more dangerous than ingesting aluminum, which breast milk includes. The form of dietary aluminum is different as is the location. Again, if the aluminum salt added to vaccines was no more dangerous than ingesting dietary aluminum, it wouldn’t be in vaccines. And if injecting aluminum was the same as ingesting it, vaccines would be pills to pop instead of shots to shoot. It is necessarily a different composition and bonded to the vaccine component to last longer and to increase the immune response.

While no pure placebo-controlled studies have been done on human subjects because it would be “unethical,” a recent study on vaccines in sheep shows that there are indeed increased physical and behavioral problems caused by aluminum injections and especially vaccine injections with aluminum adjuvants.

Conclusion

If aluminum in vaccines was no different than dietary aluminum, they wouldn’t be used. It is used because it is effective in increasing the immune response. But that also makes it difficult (especially for some people) to filter out of the body and may act as a neurotoxin in the brain.