Study on Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be

• by Marco Cáceres

• Published July 27, 2025
• Opinion

On July 15, 2025, a study conducted in Denmark was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine that concluded there is no evidence of a link between the aluminum vaccine adjuvant in and a wide range of chronic health conditions, including asthma, autism, and autoimmune diseases. The cohort study looked at data from 1,224,176 children born in Denmark during 1997-2018 and concluded that, “Cumulative aluminum exposure from vaccination during the first 2 years of life was not associated with increased rates of any of the 50 disorders assessed.”^{1 2 3 4}

The study was conducted by a group of researchers from the Statens Serum Institute, Denmark’s public health agency. Senior author Anders Peter Hviid seemed confident about reassuring the public of the study’s findings, saying… “We can exclude meaningful increases with a large degree of certainty for many of these outcomes. We should not be concerned about aluminum used as an adjuvant in childhood vaccines.”²

However, Hviid also went on to say… “These “aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines are really important for our immunization programs. Not just in Denmark, not just in the U.S., but globally. We don’t have any replacements for these vaccines with other adjuvants. So if you take them away, children are going to die.”²

This sentiment would seem to suggest a certain inherent bias.

Of the total number of children in the study, 1.2 percent received no “aluminum-adsorbed vaccines.” The rest of them had received different doses, with the amount of exposure to aluminum ranging between 0.125 to 1,00 milligrams (mg) per dose and overall median exposure of 3 mg.^{1 3}

Mainstream Feels Vindicated by Aluminum Study Results

Of course, the study is being hailed by the pharmaceutical industry, the corporate media, and many within the medical profession as proof that they’d been right all along. “While anti-vaccine advocates like [Robert F.} Kennedy [Jr.] routinely dismiss and attack the plethora of studies that do not support their dangerous claims, the new study should reassure any hesitant parents,” wrote Beth Mole in Ars Technica.⁴

“This is a rigorous and well-designed study that should put to rest any lingering doubts about the

potential risks to children from cumulative aluminum exposure in vaccines,” said epidemiologist Edward Belongia, MD of Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin. “As a practicing pediatrician, I find that reassuring, and my patients and other clinicians I work with should find that reassuring,” said Matthew Daley, MD. “I feel a sense of gratitude that they undertook this study.”²

Hvid said, “In an era marked by widespread misinformation about vaccines, it is crucial to rely on solid scientific evidence. Large, population-based register studies like this one are a bulwark against the politicization of health science, which undermines public trust in vaccines. He stressed that the aluminum in vaccines is in the form of “extremely small amounts of aluminum salts,” suggesting that the amounts are so small they could not possibly be harmful.⁵

And besides, as epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) pointed out, “Aluminum is part of our daily diet and has been since the beginning of time. That is the point people don’t understand,” again implying the harmless nature of the metal.⁶

Similarly, Carly Cassella wrote in Science Alert:

Compared to other sources of aluminum ions in our everyday lives, which are ubiquitous, the amount that children ingest from vaccines is negligible. Aluminum is an unavoidable part of our daily diets, with traces found in plants, soil, water, and air.⁷

Aluminum in Vaccines is Different from Aluminum in the Environment

Christopher Exley, PhD, who is among the world’s leading experts on aluminum, has published many studies on the toxicity of environmental aluminum exposures for humans, including via aluminum adjuvants in vaccines. In his 2020 book “Imagine You are an Aluminum Atom,” he explained the chemical and biological reactivity of aluminum and its impact on human health.^{8 9}

A former Professor of Bioinorganic Chemistry at Keele University in England and an Honorary Professor at UHI Millenium Institute, Dr. Exley said in 2019:

The presence of aluminium in brain tissue is an intoxication. It will inevitably exert toxicity at a local level. Future research is required to ascertain the significance of discrete aluminium-related neurotoxicity and how the additive effects of such neuropathologies may eventually contribute towards recognised global neurodegenerative disease characteristic of conditions such as AD, MS, epilepsy and ASD.¹⁰

Pediatrician Larry Palevsky, MD addressed the levels of aluminum in vaccines, stating, “You’ve heard that there’s no real concern about aluminum [in vaccines] because it’s such a small amount and so really it shouldn’t matter. But the kind of aluminum that we put into vaccines is a different kind of aluminum that we see environmentally.”¹¹ According to Dr. Palevsky:

This is called a nanoparticle. And nanoparticles bind really tightly to the bacteria antigens, the virus antigens, the food protein antigens, and any other contaminants that are in the vaccines that we may not know about. And we know that the biochemical properties of lipid nanoparticles is that they are capable of entering the brain. And so we have not evaluated the safety of the aluminum nanoparticle and its injection and where it goes when it gets into the body and whether it gets into the brain.¹¹

He adds…

Do vaccine ingredients belong in the brain? No. Do they get into the brain? No one has ever studied it. But animal studies using the same chemicals that are in vaccines that we give to children directly demonstrate that the vaccine ingredients do enter the brain.¹¹

Palevsky warns, “We are ignoring this information.”¹¹

Study Exclusion Criteria Would Have Excluded Most American Children

One of the most interesting aspects of this Danish study is the strict exclusion criteria for children who had received a number of vaccines routinely administered to children in the U.S. by age two. Unsurprisingly, this scientific issue has received no attention from the U.S. media.  This tidbit can be found tucked away in the study’s Supplement Table 1 titled “Exclusion criteria, outcome, and covariate definitions” under “Implausible number of childhood vaccines.”¹²

The children who were denied participation in the study were those who had received more than three diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio and Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccines, more than three Hepatitis B vaccines, or more than three pneumococcal conjugate vaccines by two years of age. That means that every single child in the United States who was administered those vaccines, which are universally recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would not have been included in the study.¹²

Under the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule, a child should receive four doses of the diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTaP) vaccine, four doses of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine, and four doses of pneumococcal conjugate (PCV15, PCV20) vaccine before two years of age.¹³

So what do the conclusions of the Danish study mean for American children? Hard to say. Not only because most children living in the U.S.  would not have been included in the study, but because this was not a placebo-controlled randomized study comparing kids vaccinated with aluminum-containing vaccines to kids who did not receive aluminum containing vaccines, and because the researchers only examined the medical records of the children up to five years of age. The five year cut-off for evaluating the 1.2 million children in the study means that the long term health outcomes of these children is not known.

Corrected Version of Study Provides Different Data

These are fairly significant limitations of the study. Add to this the recent revelation that the study researchers included an “incorrect version of the Supplementary Material” at the time of the initial publication of their study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. According to an article in The Defender, the corrected version of the material, the study’s finding are much less conclusive than initially reported.^{14 15} The publication quoted Karl Jablonowski, PhD, senior scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), as saying:

According to the corrected data, nearly 10 (9.7) of every 10,000 children who were vaccinated with a higher dose of aluminum (compared to a moderate dose) developed a neurodevelopmental disorder—mostly autism—between ages 2 and 5.¹⁵

The authors of the study “completely obfuscated what they really found—a statistically significant relationship between aluminum exposure and autism,” said Brian Hooker, PhD, CHD’s chief scientific officer.¹⁵

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