> The aluminum contained in vaccines is similar to that found in a liter (about 1 quart or 32 fluid ounces) of infant formula. While infants receive about 4.4 milligrams* of aluminum in the first six months of life from vaccines, they receive more than that in their diet. Breast-fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams, formula-fed infants ingest about 38 milligrams, and infants who are fed soy formula ingest almost 117 milligrams of aluminum during the first six months of life.
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...
Thanks to a long term study over a changing schedule they were able to layer the subjects by cumulative aluminum exposure from vaccination with aluminum-adsorbed vaccines.
No adverse associations were found, from low to high levels.
This was a study on humans, not mice, and to the best of my reading neither Tomljenovic nor Shaw were involved here.
I'm open to being wrong on that guess.
You have personally contributed 5/84 = 6% of the comments on this article.
It's good to weaken or strengthen your views based on the evidence given, and intellectual humility often leads to a better grasp of issues.
And it's also worth recognising, as another commenter has noted, that this is something that extremely few people are good at. It's an error to think that assenting to mainstream views is a strong sign of intellectual humility.
But I have to wonder if any researcher will be able to publish a study that has a hint of the opposite conclusion?
Academia is not kind to anyone going against the flow. (I am a bona fide scientist, not a do-your-own-research conspiracy theorist...)
But to really answer your question - not really. In fields where Jupyter Notebooks are common, those are generally available via a Github link, but in medical fields code and data are still relatively difficult to find.
I don’t quite get it.
You literally feel the push of the sharp needle cutting through your bone. Slowly. methodically. Half a millimeter by half millimeter every time the practitioner puts her weight on the needle.
Then, as they aspirate the marrow, you feel as if your balls are being sucked into your hips.
Then, despite the pain, I volunteered to sign up as a bone marrow donor.
Please, call me an idiot if you must, but don't explain away my distrust of vaccines with cowardice.
Forced by the government should be pushed back but not by denying evidence.
Most of the denialism is rooted in the logic of "truth of the world is what you can see and observe". This worked fine for centuries but once there was rapid progress lot of things could no longer be explained through "see and observe". This mostly happened in late 1800s and early 1900s when there was a huge leap in scientific understanding. Lot of scepticism comes from this era. In the conspiracy theory lore - Before 5G was causing COVID, electricity was causing influenza outbreak in late 1800s.
"Natural" or faith healing are thought to be observable facts. You can see a plant growing but not the vaccine produced in a lab.
Couple this with general distrust of governments - monarchy or democracy you have people doubting vaccines.
Wow. Any book/paper recommendations ? Fascinating stuff.
Anyways enough number of people believe in vaccines to have cured a pandemic. I dont think we need bother with a handful whose whole schtick rebelling against useful stuff.
>In this primary analysis, except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.13 [CI, 0.89 to 1.44]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.94 [CI, 0.79 to 1.12]), estimates for the individual outcomes were incompatible with any increased risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs below 1.00. [1]
My understanding of this, and I am a software engineer so take it with a grain of salt, is that this study failed to disprove a link between aluminum in vaccines and aspergers! There is another section where it appears they played with the hyperparameters of their study and ended up with a lower hazard ratio for aspergers (I believe by extending the analysis window to 8 years of age, but it wasn't clear to me).
>Except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.02 [CI, 0.93 to 1.12]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.95 [CI, 0.88 to 1.03]), estimates for the individual neurodevelopmental outcomes assessed were incompatible with any increases in risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs equal to or below 1.00.
That is to say, after reading the study, I am not convinced at all. I would like to see a longer analysis period (e.g. to 50 years of age) as many things go undiagnosed until later in life. From my reading though, this study failed to disprove a link despite what all the popsci headlines are saying.
1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
Edit: I know I am going to catch downvotes for this, but please go read the study and let me know where I am incorrect!
- Regulatory structure. Why can't I sue a vaccine manufacturer? Limit awards, if you necessary, but if I cant sue I cant get discovery.
- Effectiveness. The flu vaccine's effectiveness is statistical artifact. See healthy vaccine bias
- Historical effectiveness. I had a civil engineer smugly point out that his profession had ended more diseases than biology. So I looked it up. Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.
- General dishonesty of the medical profession. I don't expect my Advil to be 100% safe; I don't expect my vaccine to be either. I dont expect my medical health officers to lie about it though (see mRNA and the long dismissed myocarditis risk)
This is a cute statement but really shouldn't be part of the basis for vaccine skepticism.
Hand washing is also one of the most significant medical practice advancements... That doesn't mean we stop there.
Sure, civil engineering did a lot for water borne illness and the like. And I'll even grant that building design and HVAC systems can reduce respiratory virus transmission. But it's not doing anything for measles, smallpox, polio, ebola, hepatitis, HIV, Yellow fever, etc etc. I mean come on.
And if I do have to go to a place with worse infrastructure, I'll take that typhoid vaccine please...
There is also a massive profit motive for pharma companies and many hospitals, when you couple that with the revolving door between industry and government, it seems like a situation ripe for corruption.
I don't see the harm in removing aluminum adjuvants from vaccines (we all buy aluminum free deodorant!). I don't see the harm in not vaccinating children for things they are unlikely to come into contact with (i.e. hepatitis B). In fact, I think it would be good to make the change and see what the health outcomes are over the next 30 years. That is how we will learn.
The population for those two specific diagnoses were low in the study. Diagnostic patterns change over time for these type of disorders. Considering neurodevelopmental outcomes as a group may add more color.
You are correct that the study failed to disprove a link between aluminum and aspergers. But the study did prove a that if there is a link it does not result in a moderate to large increase in aspergers risk.
This is far from strong evidence of an effect, but you're absolutely right that this at least deserves discussion in the paper and coverage.
1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.7326/ANNALS-25-0099...
Have autism rates increased recently (last few decades)?
If so, what are the best theories for why?
This widening has multiple causes, not the least of which was an attempt to help parents of autistic children access parenting resources they otherwise couldn’t without a diagnosis in-hand.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_M...
Seeing some autism influencers on social media, I'm reminded that every childhood friend I ever had was autistic.
Instead you should follow the standards we hold for everyday occurrences, which is if there’s no compelling evidence, it’s safe to say it doesn’t happen.
I call BS.
Until there was compelling evidence that antidepressants cause suicidal ideation it's safe to say it doesn't
Until there was compelling evidence that contaminated water causes cholera it's safe to say it doesn't
Until there was compelling evidence that dirty hands cause maternal death it's safe to say it doesn't
Until there was compelling evidence that lack of sunlight causes neo-natal jaundice it's safe to say it doesn't
These examples span centuries, including the 21st, that were vigorously rejected by experts
When a layperson hears this, they'll think that there's a small but possible chance that vaccines do cause autism; when what the scientist means to say is that "it's highly unlikely that vaccines cause autism."
;-)
from what I understand about the skepticism toward adjuvants, "cumulative aluminum exposure" was not the hypothesis. It might be a proxy for the hypothesis, which has to do with repeated exposures rolling the dice, but what is the attitude of the researchers (for example, how much these researchers in this industry receive funding from this industry) would play a big role in how they designed their study. Are they really looking?
We can take a quick look: "Apart from research into epidemiology and disease prevention, [the State Serum Institute] also develops and produces vaccines ... 20% of sales are used on Research and Development"
so their funding/salaries literally comes from profit in producing these vaccines. Their statement about funding? "Primary Funding Source: None."
(I spent 5 whole minutes tracking down this info. I wrote the funding sentence before I went and looked up their funding, so it's Popper-proofed)
the low effort or low sincerity part of this study is that they are saying "aluminum in greater and greater doses is not a problem." Ok then, why are you putting aluminum in in the first place? Oh, because in small quantities it has an outsized effect, aggravating the immune system, that you think is efficacious. Have you studied that? and from people who've looked into it, no, they haven't. In some studies, they use aluminum without other components of vaccine cocktail as the placebo thereby making sure not to test it.
It's interesting how they discovered adjuvants. They were making and dispensing vaccines (I think polio) and they discovered that some of the vaccines were contaminated in the processing. So they cleaned up the contamination and discovered the vaccines didn't work as well any more. The contamination was aggravating the immune system which made the immune response greater. Now, during this process, the whole whole time at each stage they were saying "vaccines are safe and effective". It would be more honest to say what actually was the case, "turns out we didn't know how they worked, but due to the contaminated vaccines we gave you we now understand better."
the point is not "vaccines aren't effective", I think they do a lot of good; the point is they were willing to lie before and now thanks to wall street, they are even more willing to lie now.
However I can articulate that:
I don't like that vaccine makers get special immunity from lawsuits.
I don't like that pediatricians get payouts from big pharma based in what percentage of their practice received their vaccine products.
I don't like that the definition of a vaccine was changed to accommodate the mRNA COVID shots while other valid treatments that already existed were pushed aside to enable the emergency use authorization.
It's just enough to give me the ick, but their benefit is generally obvious so I hold my nose.
I just glanced through the study itself and not the article https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997 and have questions for anyone that is familiar with this sort of thing:
They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison. They looked at how many vaccinations each subject had and tabulated the total amount of aluminum they received (they have good records) in their vaccinations prior to age 2, and then looked for a correlation between higher amounts of aluminum adjutants and higher instances of all the conditions they reported on (the study does not focus on autism but many things, see figure 3 of the study)
There wasn’t a sizable aluminum free cohort because most children in Denmark got vaccinated for the data set they have to work with (figure 2). Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children? (I don’t know where in the world you would find that cohort except in countries that don’t have good healthcare systems which implies they don’t have solid tracking of health outcomes in general, or maybe the USA in the last 5-10 years.)
The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (figure 1, right column) before age 2. Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?
So to my laymen’s mind it doesn’t seem like they in any way ruled out a link between vaccines and autism. At the very best, they saw no relationship with the amount of aluminum a child received before 2 and the rate of chronic disease (figure 1). The numbers correspond to “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s, but with the data they have the confidence interval is not small enough to be sure one way or the other.
But it does not seem to me that they proved what the article and submission title states. I would appreciate someone that is familiar with biomedical research that can elaborate on whether my conclusion is sound or faulty.
Also, as I understand it aluminum is one of about 5 or so adjuvants used in vaccines at the present time, so what about the other adjuvants?
dc396•9h ago
apothegm•9h ago
That funding could have been used for something that actually advanced our knowledge. And instead it got sucked into the bottomless pit of trying to disprove something claimed by people who aren’t interested in proof.
kstrauser•9h ago
It’s shocking how often basic science turns up something wholly unexpected and new and weird and interesting.
Edit: To be super clear, I don’t buy the antivax line for a second. Nor did I remotely believe there was a link between vaccines and autism. We know there isn’t. But science means sometimes you investigate what you’re pretty sure you know just to be certain.
myvoiceismypass•8h ago
It’s okay to say “Anti Science”.
conception•8h ago
A dozen? A thousand?
beej71•8h ago
rayiner•8h ago
I’ve become persuaded that for democracy to work successfully, you need to socialize people from birth so their gut feelings are directionally correct. And you need to cultivate trust in certain institutions, in particular public health, by targeting every segment of society on their own terms and jealously guarding the institution’s credibility.
My dad worked on maternal health programs in Bangladesh. They’d build hospitals, but women in the villages wouldn’t use them. Turns out they didn’t trust the doctors, they trusted the village midwives and traditional healers. So my dad proposed to network with the midwives to establish reciprocal trust. This worked because it reflected how human trust networks operate. Public health in a developed country shouldn’t work any differently (and certainly shouldn’t work the way it does now in the U.S.).
sorcerer-mar•8h ago
The actual truth and institutional trust are both far harder to establish than they are to destroy. I'm not sure how institutions survive in the presence of this asymmetry, alt-media's conscious effort to exploit it, and freedom of speech.
keysdev•7h ago
don't think that is needed. The institutions did by themselves. Especially the large ones private and public.
sorcerer-mar•7h ago
Institutions made mistakes, sure, as they always have. None of these mistakes, individually or in aggregate, justify anything close to the discredit they've received.
Had there been similarly ignorant, ideologically motivated, and orchestrated media to report on all these institutions' past failures, they would've "failed" long ago. But because there wasn't, the institutions carried on despite their "failures" and delivered huge amounts of value to society.
For every modern transgression I can point to analogous historical ones. You can say "see, they've always been rotten!" and my response is "yet despite that they've delivered value." Almost as if real life is full of tradeoffs, complexity, tensions, and imperfections everywhere.
rayiner•7h ago
I think you need to go back further to the education system. I’m a 1990s kid, so I grew up having teachers tell us to “think for ourselves.” In high school, a bunch of our teachers joined the students in protesting the administration over a (completely innocuous) dress code. GenX and millennials were positively marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up. The Joe Rogans of the world are a predictable result of that education.
sorcerer-mar•7h ago
The most compliant, least critical, and laziest thinkers in my acquaintance are all squarely "anti-institutional" now.
> Alt-media arose in maybe the last 10 years. Most of these anti-vaxxers were fully baked (intellectually) by then
This isn't true. There was definitely a crunchy left-wing anti-institutional anti-vax cohort that's very old, but the modern energy behind the movement is not from this group. And alt-media is much older than you give it credit for. Rush Limbaugh premiered in 1988. Alex Jones' InfoWars was founded in 1999.
rayiner•6h ago
bsder•7h ago
Would that were true and they were fighting against the system right now...
They were marinated in "Both sides are bad(tm)! The System(tm) is bad. You can protest by dropping out of the system!"
Except that ... doesn't work. "Dropping out of the system" instead advantages both the status quo and those who do actually muster up the energy to fight.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790
lapcat•8h ago
It was never about that. The modern anti-vax movement has been traced back to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud But it's not like the anti-vaxxers ever fully understood the original paper, much less the follow-up papers disputing it. And in fairness to the anti-vaxxers, the paper is an example of the failure of scientific peer review. What happened was that ordinary people heard about the paper and became frightened, which is natural, but then when Wakefield's fraud and conflicts of interest were revealed, and the paper was ultimately retracted, the people who bought into the scare never came back and revised their beliefs based on new evidence. What's missing is the capacity for self-correction. Mathematics was never involved.
I suspect that people are reluctant to admit that they were duped, so they'd rather continue to believe something that's been proven false. It's emotional, not rational. And it's also social: people tend to surround themselves with others who reinforce their beliefs. This prevents backtracking and self-correction, because you have to convince your entire social group that they were wrong, not just yourself.
rayiner•8h ago
I don’t think there’s much daylight between our positions. You’re correct that mathematics was never involved. Any trust most people had in vaccines was always social, not analytical. They never understood Wakefield’s original paper, except insofar as it was reported by trusted organizations as credible. That broke people’s trust in those organizations, who had previously told everyone that vaccines were very safe.
When the retractions and follow-ups came, people weren’t able to understand them, because they were never capable of understanding the analysis in the first place! And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.
It doesn’t help that there’s a bunch of other confounding factors: rising parental age and possibly assortive mating increasing actual autism rates, changing norms around diagnosing autism, and changing incentives for autism diagnoses. We took our four year old to be evaluated, and the folks at the county told us they didn't really think any diagnosis was justified, but would have given us one if he was going to public school (where it would lead to additional services) instead of private school. They told us that point blank.
lapcat•7h ago
That's the funny thing, though. Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too. It makes no sense to claim that The Lancet is untrustworthy while you still base your beliefs on a paper because it was published in The Lancet. If the journal goes down, the journal articles have to go down with it.
The difference is that these people had spent years building a personal identity around vaccine skepticism, as embattled fighters for the safety of children. Retraction of their beliefs would have been very painful, a blow to their self-image. Thus, it was easier to invent conspiracy theories about how their beliefs are still true, and now there's a cover-up.
rayiner•7h ago
lapcat•6h ago
Obviously you should be skeptical of anything they said. There was indisputably one big lie, whether then or now. If you really want to know which is the lie, you'd need to get independent confirmation.
The explanation of the lie matters. If it's, "I lied about cheating on you, and now I want you back", then lolno. If it was more like, "I was just sick of you, but you wouldn't have left me unless I drove you away", that's more plausible.
pton_xd•7h ago
As far as I can tell, the modern movement is fueled by personal anecdotes of family members / friends having young children present with autism after certain developmental milestones. The family goes, what went wrong? Well, we recently got them a bunch of shots, maybe it was that. Combined with the expanding vaccination schedule those coincidences are increasingly likely to occur. Then yeah that paper comes up when the families do a bit of research which does add more conviction to the belief.
guelo•7h ago
pton_xd•7h ago
rayiner•7h ago
anon84873628•5h ago
You've got "post hoc ergo propter hoc" plus the naturalistic fallacy. Might as well label the vaccines as a needle full of capitalism juice.
all2•7h ago
I've never heard of this paper, but I am aware of the judicial capture that pharma companies manage to get for themselves. A whole extra judicial organization to handle vaxx related damages.
That's why I don't trust them. Amongst other things (burgers for vaxxes is an odd choice, speaking charitably).
Spooky23•7h ago
In that vacuum, some people found independent churches and legacies, and others ended up following woo-woo new age bs, which the Internet organized at scale. We know about the Wakefield study because zealots pushed it hard. Fluoridation is another example - my city recently started it and the council was brigaded by lunatics from all over the world losing their minds over it.
rayiner•6h ago
clickety_clack•8h ago
thegrim33•8h ago
But how can you expect to convince doubters when a claim like "no link between vaccines and autism" is made, and all you have to do is click your left mouse button twice to pull up the actual research, and see that what was actually studied was "did a certain amount of increase in aluminum content in vaccines create more negative health effects than the vaccines with the previous aluminum content?". That's what was studied here, that is the source for this article.
Yes, these things are related, but intentionally removing that context and misrepresenting the actual result does not convince people to believe you, it just drives them further away. It's so easy for a reader to see for themselves that the claim that's being made in this case is not remotely what the source research is actually claiming. How does that increase trust?
SubiculumCode•8h ago
pdxandi•7h ago
So while the article’s headline simplifies the finding by saying “no link between vaccines and autism,” it’s not inaccurate. It reflects the key takeaway, that within the vaccines that include aluminum, which are widely used in childhood immunizations, there is no indication of increased risk. That’s important and relevant.
It’s fair to expect transparency, and I agree that people should be encouraged to read the actual research, but in this case it seems to me that the summary is consistent with what the study actually tested and found.
lettergram•7h ago
> A new Danish study finds no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions, including autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. The findings reaffirm the safety of Denmark’s childhood vaccination program.
Breaking it down --
1. The study was Denmark specific 2. The study inspected aluminum specifically 3. (Based on reading, it seems to) Reaffirm the findings that the vaccines are safe, conducted / funded by those who set the policy
Here's the actual study: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
Note the main researcher is funded by Novo Nordisk: https://researchleaderprogramme.com/recipients/anders-hviid/
And is frequently trying to debunk criticisms of drugs, often with phrasing such as this.
https://www.contagionlive.com/view/hpv-vaccination-does-not-...
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/740704
and the list goes on...
hopelite•8h ago
fsckboy•8h ago
the truly sad part to me is that you could/would have written this before this study. I don't believe that you have evaluated the validity of this study yet, but you feel justified in telling us you've already made up your mind and you don't really believe in the follow through part of the scientific method, instead you're playing the tribe game
lettergram•7h ago
> no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions
It's right in the title, which was omitted on submission.
The concerns the public have are not aluminum, so of course it wont. Should also point out the argument largely made is that the _quantity_ of vaccines, particularly in the US are part of the problem.
Generally speaking, I'd welcome studies on what folks are actually saying. Having friends in both the avid vaccine advocates and the anti-vaccine crowd, I think both are just arguing past each other and not studying stuff rigorously enough to convince the other.