Controversial CDC panel to review aluminum salts used in many vaccines

by · UPI

Dec. 29 (UPI) -- A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel dominated by vaccine skeptics is signaling it will review the use of aluminum salts used in many vaccines during the coming year, despite strongly held beliefs by medical experts that the additives are safe and necessary.

Aluminum has been added to vaccines for nearly 100 years as an "adjuvant" to help the body build a stronger immune response. Without them, many vaccines simply wouldn't work or would provide only short-lasting protection.

The additives are used in half the U.S. supply of childhood vaccines, such as those against hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus and human papillomavirus.

But aluminum salts have also become a target for vaccine skeptics, including some public figures who have called them harmful in spite of evidence to the contrary contained in many major studies.

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President Donald Trump's health and human services secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., has long questioned the safety of aluminum in vaccines, purporting it to be linked to the rise in autism and childhood allergies in recent decades.

For instance, speaking to the National Governors Association meeting in Colorado Springs, Colo., on July 26, Kennedy said, "We need to look at the aluminum in the vaccines to see if that has anything to do with this explosion of allergies that began in 1989, which was the year they expanded the vaccine schedule."

The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which guides the agency's policies on vaccines, ignited a firestorm among public health advocates earlier this month when it voted 8-to-3 to end the decades-old recommendation to automatically vaccinate newborns against hepatitis B, a practice that scientists say led to a reduction of childhood infections of the virus by 99% since 1991 to only seven cases in 2023.

That vote came six months after Kennedy removed all 17 existing members of the ACIP and replaced them with new appointees, including several who share his vaccine skepticism.

In addition to the controversial hepatitis B recommendation, ACIP members at their Dec. 5 meeting also signaled they would accelerate a push into questioning the use of aluminum in vaccines.

A presentation delivered by Evelyn Griffin, a New Orleans obstetrician-gynecologist who has since been appointed the state of Louisiana's surgeon general, contained suggestions that injected aluminum could accumulate in organs and cause chronic fatigue and other issues -- a theory that has been hotly disputed by many others.

"Experimental and clinical data suggests that intramuscular injected aluminum and aluminum salts can persist at the injection site, then migrate via immune cells to the liver, spleen and other organs, including the brain," Griffin said.

She urged the CDC panel to continue to "assess the effectiveness and safety" of adjuvants in all vaccines currently on the U.S. schedule, including those for children, adolescents, adults and pregnant women.

Scientists warned, however, that requiring the removal of aluminum adjuvants in these common vaccines would make it necessity for each to be reformulated with new adjuvants and then be rigorously tested -- process that could take up to decade to complete.

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor University and a professor of pediatric health, echoed a common concern that vaccine skeptics on the advisory board are not experts in the field and are in fact cherry-picking data to back preconceived opinions.

The seemingly imminent "assessment" of aluminum adjuvants shows the panel has been "packed with anti-vaccine activists and zealots," Hotez told UPI. "The ACIP has ceased to be a reliable source for anything vaccine related and their recommendations should be ignored."

He noted that the American Academy of Pediatrics has "now gone off on their own to issue more reliable and evidence-based recommendations, while at least two coalitions of states have formed in the Northeast and on the West Coast to draw up independent recommendations.

"We are entering a dark period in which we can no longer trust the federal government and their agencies, or their advisory committees, to deliver science-based vaccine policies," Hotez warned. "It's looking like 2026 could be even worse than 2025."

For an "accurate" assessment of the safety of aluminum adjuvants, he instead pointed to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in July that evaluated health records of 1.2 million children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018.

It found no association between vaccine additives and health conditions including asthma, allergies (including food allergies), autoimmune disorders and neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and ADHD.

Kennedy, however, denounced that study's findings, calling the paper a "deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry" and demanding its retraction.

Meanwhile, another team of U.S. researchers affiliated mainly with Stanford University earlier this month published a review of the available scientific evidence on the purported toxicity of aluminum adjuvants.

They found that while some small studies have raised concerns about possible links between some vaccine additives and conditions such as autism, allergies and other autoimmune and neurodevelopmental diseases, other "large, rigorous" trials -- including previously referenced Danish study -- have not supported any connection between these conditions and aluminum salts or other components of childhood vaccines.

The review's co-author, Dr. Seth Ari Sim-Son Hoffman, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford Medicine and a member of the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute, said researchers reached their findings after poring through data stretching back decades.

"We reviewed nearly 100 years of safety data, including multiple large epidemiologic studies, the largest examining over 1.2 million children, pharmacokinetic modeling by the [Food and Drug Administration] and European researchers, and clinical surveillance across diverse populations globally," he told UPI.

"We specifically reviewed neurotoxicity, autism spectrum disorder, allergic disease and autoimmune conditions. The consistency of safety findings across different populations, countries and study designs supports our conclusion," he said. "We found no credible evidence linking aluminum salt-adjuvanted vaccines to any safety signal."

As for concerns about aluminum accumulating in the organs of newborns, Hoffman said studies in preterm infants showed "no detectable change in blood aluminum levels after vaccination," while patients with kidney disease, who are already vulnerable to aluminum toxicity, "receive these vaccines routinely without developing toxicity or safety concerns."

Aluminum adjuvants are present in more than half of the vaccines used in the U.S. pediatric schedule "and are essential for those current vaccines to work effectively," he said.

"Removing them would require developing alternatives and conducting new clinical trials, which are costly and take substantial time, while leaving populations vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases which can cause chronic disease and death -- even while we have vaccines that already have proven long-term safety and efficacy data."