Aluminum in Vaccines Far Exceeds ‘Safe’ Limits for Infants, Critics Say

Science & Health

9 hours ago

Originally posted by: Children's Health Defense

The Trump administration’s plan to study the use of aluminum in childhood vaccines “worries scientists” who believe the metal is “very safe, but also effective,” NPR reported today.

Not all scientists and physicians agree with NPR’s spin. For decades, experts have raised concerns about — or more recently warned against — using aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, especially vaccines given to infants and young children.

Aluminum is a versatile lightweight metal abundant in the Earth’s crust, used in cookware, food and drink packaging, construction materials, electronics and many other applications.

Aluminum salts are added to vaccines as an adjuvant — an ingredient that increases the drug’s effect by stimulating the immune system to respond. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), aluminum salts are required to elicit a strong immune response.

While that’s true, it doesn’t mean aluminum adjuvants are safe, said Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski.

“Aluminum is not benign. The injected aluminum gets deposited throughout the body, including 1% of retained aluminum found in the brain.”

Jablonowski noted that animals make use of a great number of elements found on Earth — but the one element they avoid, and which has “no known positive biological function,” is aluminum.

Jablonowski also disputes the claim that aluminum adjuvants are the only way to make a vaccine trigger a strong immune response.

“There are alternatives to aluminum adjuvants such as calcium phosphate,” he said. “With strong evidence of aluminum-generated disease in children, ethics must guide us towards exploring aluminum-free vaccines.”

A new working group established by advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is now tasked with that challenge. The group will review the agency’s entire schedule of recommended vaccines for children and teens, including the cumulative effect of multiple vaccines and specific ingredients, like aluminum.

Meanwhile, how much aluminum is being injected into kids today?

Seven vaccines regularly administered to infants and adolescents contain aluminum: diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP and Tdap); Haemophilus influenzae type B; pneumococcal; hepatitis A; hepatitis B; human papillomavirus (HPV); and meningococcal B.

Children and teens following the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule typically get up to 22 doses of aluminum-containing vaccines from birth to age 18.

Half of those are administered by age 6 months, according to Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC).

Some other vaccines available to children, but not routinely recommended — such as the Japanese encephalitis vaccine and the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine — also contain aluminum.

Why aluminum is far more harmful when injected, rather than ingested

Legacy media and vaccine-promoting organizations such as the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Vaccine Education Center cite the 100-year history of aluminum in vaccines as proof that the adjuvants are safe.

But according to Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, “The aluminum adjuvant is not one adjuvant, but several different adjuvants using different aluminum compounds, or aluminum mixtures which may have different effects.”

An adjuvant is necessary to achieve the desired efficacy for many vaccines that don’t contain a weakened live virus, and the adjuvants work in different ways, Nass told The Defender. “They may nonspecifically stimulate the immune system and the response to an injected antigen. They also may bind to the antigen and slowly release it over time, providing longer-term immune stimulation.”

The amount of aluminum adjuvant in vaccines typically ranges from 125 to 850 micrograms per dose, or between 0.125 milligrams and 0.85 milligrams, although according to CHOP, some vaccines can contain up to 1.5 milligrams.

CHOP says that exposure is nothing to worry about, because it’s comparable to the amount of aluminum found in infant formula — even breastfed infants are exposed to small quantities of aluminum in breastmilk.

It is unknown how quickly aluminum from vaccines migrates into the bloodstream, although animal studies suggest it can take months to a year.

Outlets like Scientific American quote CHOP’s fact pages to promote the idea that those roughly equivalent numbers mean aluminum exposure in vaccines is not a concern.

“During the first six months of life, babies receive about four milligrams of aluminum from vaccines, 10 milligrams from breast milk or 40 milligrams from regular formula. Babies who are fed with soy-based formula ingest almost 120 milligrams during the same period,” Scientific American reports.

However, according to PIC, when aluminum is swallowed, the body absorbs only a tiny amount — about one-tenth of 1% — because the digestive system blocks most of it.

But when aluminum is injected into muscle, as it is with vaccines, it bypasses the digestive system. That means nearly all of it can eventually enter the bloodstream, which is roughly a thousand times more than when it’s taken by mouth.

How much aluminum is ‘safe’?

In 2008, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), determined that no more than 1 milligram (1,000 micrograms) per kilogram of body weight should be taken orally daily.

To derive the amount of aluminum that can be safely injected based on the ATSDR limit, scientists at PIC divided the oral safety limit by 1,000.

Based on that calculation, the daily amount of aluminum entering the bloodstream that is safe is about 1 microgram per kilogram of body weight per day.

For infants, that means the limit varies depending on their size and weight.

For example, on average, the limit for newborns would be 3.3 micrograms/day; at age 2 months, it would be 5.3 micrograms/day; at 4 months, it would be 6.7 micrograms/day; at 6 months, it would be 7.6 micrograms/day; and at 12 months, it would be 9.3 micrograms/day, according to PIC.

That means even the aluminum-adjuvant containing vaccine with the lowest aluminum content — the Prevnar 13 pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, first administered at age 2 months, contains nearly five times the ATSDR safety limit.

Infants following CDC schedule exposed to aluminum at 10-20 times FDA’s ‘safe’ limit

The FDA in 1968 set a limit of 850 micrograms per dose of aluminum in vaccines, but that number wasn’t based on safety — it was based on the amount of aluminum needed to make some vaccines effective, according to researchers James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., and Robert Ricketson.

That number was never scaled for vaccine use in infants.

The administration of one dose each of Prevnar 13, PedvaxHIB, Engerix-B (hepatitis B), and Infanrix (DTaP) at one visit — all recommended at the 2- and 4-month wellness visits, and administered multiple times by 6 months of age — delivers 1,225 micrograms of aluminum at once.

In a 2018 paper, Lyons-Weiler and Ricketson found that the vaccines on the CDC schedule can exceed safe limits by 10-20 times in babies under 6 months. Later research confirmed their findings.

Christopher Exley, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminum exposure, has also raised concerns that vaccines contain more aluminum than the manufacturers report to the FDA.

Aluminum quantity is self-reported, and the FDA doesn’t verify the content. In a 2021 paper published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, Exley and colleagues measured the aluminum content of 13 infant vaccines.

They found the amount of aluminum in the vaccine indicated by the manufacturer was close to accurate for only three vaccines.

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Research links aluminum to allergies, autism and SIDS

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sparked controversy when he suggested that aluminum may be partially responsible for the rise in allergies among U.S. kids, according to The New York Times.

Although there is conflicting data, multiple studies have linked aluminum adjuvants to illnesses, including asthma, autism, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

For example, a 2023 study in Academic Pediatrics reported that aluminum exposure before age 2 modestly increased the risk of asthma.

Additional research in Autoimmunity Reviews (2019), the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry (2009) and the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology (2018) suggests injected aluminum can persist in muscle and brain tissue, potentially contributing to neurological or autoimmune conditions.

In contrast, a 2025 study in Annals of Internal Medicine examined 1.2 million Danish children and found no connection between aluminum exposure and 50 health outcomes, including asthma, autism and autoimmune diseases.

Critics of the study — including Kennedy and CHD, which published a rebuttal — argued that the study’s lack of an unvaccinated comparison group undermined its conclusions.

When Kennedy called for the paper to be retracted, the journal declined, stating that the study showed no scientific misconduct.

Historical models supporting aluminum safety have also come under scrutiny, according to Lyons-Weiler. A 2011 study in the journal Vaccine — long used to justify current vaccine safety claims — relied on oral aluminum studies in adult mice, but failed to account for infant weight, kidney immaturity or the injected route of exposure.

Critics said these oversights render the model’s conclusions unreliable.

ATSDR at HHS recognizes aluminum as a known neurotoxin, and the FDA has warned about the risk of aluminum toxicity in children.

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