Hopefully nobody told you that "this trial shows that substance X is not harmful" while pointing to this study, which is not a trial, but a cohort study making use of the fact that different birth years in Denmark received different amounts of aluminum in their already-approved-after-trials early-childhood vaccinations to study the effect on 50 different chronic diseases.

They excluded children from the study that didn't fit the demographic they were trying to study (didn't get their early-childhood vaccinations, e.g. because they died too young) or that had other diseases known to cause the chronic diseases they were trying to study (if you have a respiratory tract infection and develop asthma, is that because of vaccines or because of the infection?) so that they could deal with slightly less messy data.

Kennedy might've preferred it if they'd done a double-blind trial revealing injuries associated with high exposures to aluminum adjuvants in childhood vaccines, but that's not the question they were trying to answer.

> Seems like you would def want to compare the two groups, so what did this study actually do?

You are right. Indeed, all vaccines and drugs undergo clinical trials testing for safety first, efficacy then, before being approved for sale and distribution.

The study in question analyzes data that was routinely collected after the vaccine was approved, that is why they didn't do the randomization themselves.

One of these vaccines is DTaP-IPV/Hib aka Pentacel, and the clinical results for it are reported here: https://www.fda.gov/files/vaccines,%20blood%20&%20biologics/...

> The two controlled pivotal safety studies, overall rates of serious adverse events were similar in Pentacel and Control subjects.

(Tested on about 5,000 children younger than two years old and getting two or three doses of the vaccine).

Another trial for that vaccine was recently performed in Japan, also not finding significant rates of adverse events: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32307307/

> no vaccinated vs unvaccinated comparison

You dont need a placebo group, when you have alot of samples with varying exposures. Focusing on the unvaccinated is a strawman.

> Exclusion of N children.

Cleaning of data is really common practice in statistical analysis, you should declare it though. If you where tasked to summarize performance metrics in a company to find a base line, would you include days where eg. earth quakes hit?

>I'm not a scientist, but if you were to tell me "this trial shows that substance X is not harmful", I would think ideally it would give substance X to one group and a placebo to the other group. If not possible, it would look after the fact to see group A that received substance X compared to group B that didn't, large enough sample so it would be relatively controlled for extraneous variables. Seems like you would def want to compare the two groups, so what did this study actually do?

You cannot give a placebo vaccine once is it standard of care. No IRB is going to approve a placebo control group for a study (nor should they) on a vaccine that is already SoC. This is why we let actual scientists and doctors design the experiments, and not random HN readers. It would be incredibly unethical to give a placebo vaccine for tetanus. Think about what you are suggesting here. You are suggesting that children potentially die of entirely avoidable tetanus, for the sake of running an experiment. At the bare minimum, that is medical malpractice. I won't get into what it is at the other end of the spectrum, beyond this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

Chlorine is a major component in table salts = in most food = evolutionarily harmless!

See how that doesn't make sense?

These grifters take something that sounds bad but out of context, make way too big a deal about it, then turn around and sell you supplements to fix the problems. I have no idea why anyone trusts them but it seems to work

Aluminum is part of natural materials, but I see no evidence that it naturally gets into a human's blood in similar levels to injected aluminum from vaccines. See my reply to the "10X more aluminum in a muffin than a vaccine" comment on this page.

(disclaimer - not anti-vax, just addressing a simplistic argument that didn't hold up to scrutiny)

To put the numbers in perspective, more lives have been saved by vaccines than the number of lives lost, military and civilian, in all wars anywhere in the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. The only comparable invention in terms of human lives saved is antibiotics.

We remember the war dead; the lives saved, not so much.

no one is injecting muffins, or tuna fish

You're forgetting about the 5G chips used to make you a gay liberal. Yes, people believe this.

Disclaimer: I'm not claiming injecting aluminum is dangerous, but I must address this argument that we get way more from food than injections and the claim that what is injected quickly leaves the body. I've seen these arguments often but can't find solid basis for them.

It's a false equivalency to compare an amount of a substance eaten vs injected. Injected substances can get to places in the body and in different quantities than substances eaten.

There are different forms of aluminum, with different absorption rates, and different potential behaviors in the body.

Here's a study of aluminum accumulation in rodents after injection: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-...

I don't think there are any studies showing that aluminum doesn't accumulate or remain in the body long after injection - while I've found ~5 studies indicating that it does.

Doesn't mean it's dangerous, just that some amount of it does stick around long term and it is not clear to me that it's a drop in the bucket compared to the aluminum we eat. We also eat a lot more aluminum than people used to before the industrial revolution. The amounts of aluminum we eat now could be mildly harmful too - I don't know about that.

Below is the math on amount of aluminum that a normal baby ingests vs gets injected. I got a result that a baby's first year they get between 2x to 65x as much aluminum in their blood from injections vs from feeding.

A baby drinking breast milk (250L in the first year) would get 250 * 40µg = 10mg of aluminum in their first year from breast milk. A baby eats around 300000 calories in their first year, which leaves 120000 not from breast milk. At a rate of 8mg of aluminum per 2300 calories this would be another 416mg of aluminum from food for a total of 426mg.

The absorption rate into the bloodstream of that aluminum would vary between ~0.01% (for aluminum hydroxide) to ~0.3% (for aluminum citrate), so they would get 0.04mg to 1.3mg of aluminum in their blood across the first year from ingestion. Compared to 0.125mg to 0.85mg per dose of vaccine. They get around 10 doses of vaccines containing aluminum in the first year, for around ~2.6mg of aluminum total, but 100% of that is absorbed since it's injected. So the amount that gets into the blood during the first year from vaccination is somewhere from 2 to 65 times the amount a baby would get in their blood from eating/drinking.

I could be wrong on this logic or math somewhere, and welcome being corrected.

Another aspect of this is that the injected aluminum adjuvant comes in big (relative to ingestion) sudden doses with the intent to trigger a significant immune response to the antigen. That could affect the body differently than a gradual very small daily dose.

Again, not claiming that injecting aluminum is dangerous, but it seems to me babies could be getting far more persistent aluminum in their bodies from injections than from food, and as far as I know this has not undergone a long term study showing that it's safe. Almost all vaccine studies have aluminum injected in both arms of the study, and I haven't found a single aluminum vs placebo study - please share if you have one.