Our Children at Risk—Aluminum, Vaccine Schedules, and Stifled Debate by Gretchen DuBeau, Esq.

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Our Children at Risk—Aluminum, Vaccine Schedules, and Stifled Debate

by Gretchen DuBeau, Esq. | Guest Writer

Published July 15, 2016 | Law, State Legislatures

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Gretchen DuBeau, Esq.

When health officials assure us that almost all children should receive the full schedule of vaccinations, you would think that rigorous safety testing has repeatedly proven vaccines, their ingredients, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) schedule to be completely safe. The sobering truth is, however, that this safety testing has been conspicuously lacking and in many cases simply has not been done.
Until these extremely serious safety concerns are adequately addressed, it is unethical—and very possibly dangerous—to force children to be vaccinated.
Take aluminum, for example, which has been added to vaccines since the 1930’s to help jolt the body’s immune system into action. Aluminum is a well-documented neurotoxin linked with Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, asthma, hyperactivity, and Down’s syndrome.
Despite these dangers, adequate clinical research proving aluminum adjuvants to be safe has never been done. Health authorities claim, however, that aluminum levels in vaccines are safe since it has been used for decades and that the metal is abundant in nature.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set a limit to the amount of aluminum that can be in vaccines, but this number was based on the amount of aluminum required to enhance the effectiveness of the vaccine. The agency has not empirically determined the safest amount of intramuscularly injected aluminum, relying instead on mere belief that current levels are safe.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined a minimum risk level for orally ingested aluminum based on rat studies, which is often what is used to justify aluminum adjuvants in vaccines. The problem is that ingesting aluminum orally, where only about 0.25% is absorbed and then filtered by the kidneys, is very different than injecting it directly into muscle, where it may be absorbed at nearly 100% efficiency over time and can accumulate in organs, including the brain.

This complete lack of evidence proving the safety of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines is unacceptable and should concern any parent who trusts health authorities with the safety of their children.
Yet last summer, California passed SB 277, which eliminated all non-medical exemptions to vaccinations for children attending private or public schools. This ill-advised law and the vaccine schedule it promotes threaten to mandate childhood doses of a dangerous metal.
The rationale offered by the bill’s supporters echoed what we are so often told in the news—that the scientific community is “nearly unanimous” in its determination that vaccines are safe. To question anything vaccine-related has become akin to questioning the roundness of the Earth. This view makes rational debate extremely difficult.
As for the safety of vaccines, the scientific community is far from “nearly unanimous.” Many doctors and researchers have raised serious concerns about vaccine ingredients like aluminum.
Animal studies, for instance, have demonstrated a link between repeated inoculation with aluminum-containing vaccines and severe neurobehavioral outcomes (restlessness, muscle tremors, loss of response to stimuli), the presence of aluminum in central nervous system tissue, and altered expression of certain genes in the brain.
Our independent laboratory tests show that the vaccines for DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough) and hepatitis B contain 366 and 268 micrograms of aluminum per dose, respectively. Children receiving the full CDC schedule of vaccines may be exposed to as much as 4,225 micrograms of aluminum in their first year of life.
To put this in perspective, the animals mentioned above were given an aluminum dose in a range that is nearly comparable to what children on the CDC schedule receive.This should give us all pause.
When we compare childhood doses to adult doses the numbers are even scarier. For an adult to get the same amount of aluminum per kilogram of weight that a newborn gets with just the hepatitis B shot, that adult would need to get 10 standard doses of that vaccine in a single day. Similarly, for an adult to get the same amount of aluminum in microgram per kilogram of weight that a two-month-old infant gets from multiple vaccine injections (a total of 1225 micrograms) scheduled for the two month pediatric visit, that adult would have to receive 34 adult doses of the hepatitis B vaccine.
At best, we are rolling the dice when it comes to our children’s health. How has it come to this? A clue was provided in a recent Congressional audit of the FDA whichconcluded that the agency “cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific base has eroded and its scientific organizational structure is weak.” Our health officials are woefully behind on the science, and it’s our children who are paying the price.

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Note: This article was reprinted with the author’s permission. It was originally published in The Hill. Gretchen DuBeau is the executive director of Alliance for Natural Health USA.