Aluminum Standard Science

Because "deceptive devices" sounds better than "statistical tests that RFK Jr. doesn't like or understand"

Note from Angie (August 3, 2025): Anders Hviid, the lead author of the study RFK, Jr. is criticizing, has responded with a blog entry of his own pointing out how wrong Kennedy is about their study and categorically denying any financial conflicts of interest or deceptive practices.

It’s a beautiful Saturday in my little corner of North America so I thought I’d ruin it by firing up the old social media and seeing what Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy is up to. Mission accomplished.

Back in June, drunk on power from firing ACIP and replacing them with the Anti-Vax All Stars, Kennedy threatened to conduct a review of aluminum salt vaccine adjuvants. Unfortunately, it appears he has delivered on this promise.

Kennedy has been hard at work crafting a review of sorts, if “review” is defined as a conspiratorial screed about big pharma using the Danish national health research institute, media manipulation, and statistical trickery to cover up an epidemic of neurological injuries caused by aluminum salt-adjuvanted vaccines. This exposé was not peer-reviewed or published in any credible journal. Kennedy is a journal-hating Open Science kind of guy, so he published on the pseudoscience-friendly blog TrialSite News. TSN is a pharma conspiracy-curious website that has previously printed articles by anti-vax luminaries like Steve Kirsch claiming that mRNA vaccines “seeks out your daughter’s ovaries and instructs the cells in the ovaries to turn out a very toxic spike protein,” so it’s a perfect venue for America’s top health official to publish his own analysis.

One of my favorite things about Kennedy is that this guy writes an abstract tweet like he’s trying to blurb a James Patterson thriller on clearance at the airport Hudson News. Dangerous deceptions! Calamitous evidence! Obliterated taboos! Honestly, I was hoping the article would be more exciting but, as is evergreen when it comes to Kennedy, it’s just the usual AI-generated complement of cherry-picked references, statistical mumbo jumbo, and exaggerated or invented claims about safety. Your average anti-vax blog post, except it’s written by the HHS Secretary in his official capacity.

What’s the deal with aluminum salts?

Aluminum salts are used as adjuvants—compounds that are added to vaccines to boost immune responses. Despite being used for nearly a century with no indication of being hazardous, the anti-vax movement has persistently questioned their safety and implied that they are linked to autism. Just like thimerosal. And the MMR vaccine. And On July 15, 2025, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study done by the Danish Statens Serum Institute (basically Denmark’s equivalent to the NIH) that examined the health records of around 1.2 million kids over 20 years and concluded that cumulative exposure to aluminum salts in vaccines did not increase risk of other diseases, including the chronic diseases Kennedy purports to care so much about.

Honestly not very surprising, considering aluminum salts were first reported to have adjuvant activity in 1926. They’ve been used safely for nearly a century.

Kennedy is upset that this “intensely ballyhooed” study got some media coverage that undermined the anti-vax propaganda that he’s so devoted to spreading. In his words, the “slavish, pharma-funded mainstream media, ever eager to defend industry orthodoxies, have triumphantly hailed this study as proof of aluminum’s safety without even a cursory examination of the study’s fatal deficiencies or the financial conflicts of its authors.”

Fortunately, Kennedy is free from Big Pharma’s corrupting grip and is available to conduct this examination, which mostly consists of him demonstrating his vast ignorance of basic concepts of study design, statistical methods, and experimental controls. Kennedy thinks aluminum salts are dangerous and the paper in question is evidence of deceptive Danish government scientists obeyed the commands of Big Aluminum Salt Adjuvants. This is all part of a diabolical global megacorporation plot to keep cashing in by making famously unprofitable vaccines formulated with an unpatentable salt that has been used for decades. He says that this is why there is no trust in scientists anymore!

Speaking of trust, Kennedy’s article also showcases his remarkable ability to shamelessly and obviously lie. He explicitly accuses the mainstream media of a key role in this scheme too. The media advanced the Big Aluminum Salt Adjuvant narrative by accurately reporting that this peer-reviewed paper published in a reputable medical journal found no increased risk for any autoimmune, inflammatory, or neurodevelopmental disease after vaccination with aluminum salts in more than a million kids over two decades. Kennedy invented a really poorly thought out conspiracy theory to discredit this paper by suggesting it was a “deceptive device” to hide the shocking truth about aluminum salts.He misrepresents the data set, misrepresents or manufactures evidence about the safety and mechanism of action of aluminum salt adjuvants, and implied some type of unspecified misconduct by the authors and the journal for releasing additional supplementary data after the paper was published. Kennedy complains at length about things that are standard for any kind of epidemiological study: adjusting for confounding variables, cleaning the data, removing outliers, and deidentification to protect the privacy of the children whose health records were used in this study. He does not demonstrate even the most superficial understanding of fundamentals of statistical methods for addressing the complexity of gigantic clinical datasets, but he doesn’t need to. This isn’t his first rodeo presenting data in a misleading and conspiratorial way to support unscientific claims about vaccine safety.

He also demonstrates his seemingly limitless capacity for lying about what constitutes a financial conflict of interest. He describes the Statens Serum Institut, which is a government research institute similar to the NIH, as a “government-owned vaccine company” and suggests that the authors should have all declared this as a conflict of interest. The senior author reported several research grants, including one from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which funds vaccine research. In the authors’ disclosure forms, it is quite clear that the Novo Nordisk Foundation grant is unrelated to the paper. Yet Kennedy threatens that the US will not do business with Novo Nordisk or possibly the nation of Denmark unless they get with the “gold standard science” program of being virulently anti-vax.

If “gold standard science” means not collaborating or doing business with anyone who gets grants to study vaccine safety, then I’m sure Kennedy will declare his own financial interests in vaccine safety studies…right?

Kennedy is flat out wrong that getting a grant from a private foundation or working for a government agency that also procures vaccines for a national public health program calls a study’s independence or objectivity into question. I notice he did not declare his own conflicts of interest, specifically his own law firm’s interest in anti-vaccine litigation or his personal stake in settlements or awards from lawsuits against Merck over Gardasil, which is an aluminum salt-adjuvanted vaccine. Kennedy pledged to divest his interest in the Merck lawsuits, although it is unclear if he has done so. He also did not disclose that he personally made an additional six-figure salary for years by cultivating doubt about vaccine safety with the organization he founded, Children’s Health Defense. Given he has personally profited from his own vaccine-related “research,” the biggest financial conflict of interest is his own.

What will happen if he takes out aluminum salts?

Pre-Kennedy, anti-vax horseshit about vaccines on the internet was a problem, but never has it been such a clear and alarming indicator of terrible impending public health policies as when it’s coming from the HHS Secretary and branded as “gold standard science.” If Kennedy is signaling that aluminum salts are about to go the way of thimerosal, then we have a very serious problem.

A lot of vaccines use aluminum salts as an adjuvant, because decades of use has shown them to be safe and effective. These include hepatitis A virus (HAV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), human papillomavirus (HPV), diptheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP, DTaP/polio/Hib/HBV combination, Td, Tdap), Haemophilus influenzae B (Hib), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), meningococcal meningitis, and pneumococcal pneumonia vaccines. A lot of different people are at risk of these diseases and need these vaccines. And Kennedy is an anti-vax ideologue who has personally profited from attacking the HPV and HBV vaccines. He stands to reap enormous financial rewards from targeting these vaccines. Only one problem: lots of people will get very sick and die as a result.

Kennedy could get all these vaccines off the market by getting aluminum salts banned. He could do this several ways, including getting his minions FDA Commissioner Marty Makary or Vinay Prasad’s replacement at CBER to abuse their regulatory powers, getting his anti-vax cronies on ACIP to recommend against its use, or just unilaterally banning it like he did with COVID vaccines for pregnant people and children.

If aluminum salts are forbidden, these vaccines will still all require adjuvants, and fortunately alternatives exist. However, some of these other adjuvants are likely be targeted with similar weaponized safety concerns in the future. Even worse, any new vaccine formulation will need to be approved by the FDA. Kennedy previously declared that all new vaccines will require placebo-controlled trials under his watch.

That will not happen with these vaccines, because they have already been shown to work safely, and it would be highly unethical to expose children, who are minors and cannot legally consent to participating in a study, to deadly diseases when there is a known way to prevent them. No Institutional Review Board (IRB), the ethics panel that assesses and oversees studies involving human participants, would ever approve such a study. If Kennedy kills the adjuvant, he could kill the vaccines altogether.

Kennedy has been the anti-vax GOAT for a long time. For years, he has exploited the uncertainty of science and the rhetoric of doubt to prop up his flimsy arguments. He is very experienced at this and very good at it. He is serving the Trump administration’s objectives and they align with his own: ban vaccines, get revenge, and steal Americans’ wealth. He is in a position to enact policy that will accomplish all of these objectives with regard to aluminum salt adjuvants. The cost may be losing access to numerous vaccines, and consequently losing a lot of people. Even worse, there’s only so much we can do about it.

What we can do is hold Kennedy accountable for every lie that he tells and for every action that he takes based on these lies. His lies about aluminum salt adjuvants suggest that he’s going to target them next and he will probably succeed in making them less accessible. He should not get away with making policy that will put people at risk of preventable death because he wrote a pseudoscientific blog post and it goes unnoticed because that’s what he always does. I don’t think that it should be easy for him. He should have to answer to the people he’s putting at risk, namely the American public. Whatever his ability to inflict a critical hit against public health, we should not and must not stop objecting to this.