RFK Jr demanded a vaccine study be retracted – the journal said no

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02682-9

by rntn • 11 months ago

122 62 11 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250822174237/https://www.natur...

bko• 11 months ago

Kennedy also criticized the fact that the authors did not compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children to determine whether any aluminium exposure causes harm, even though they had some data on unvaccinated children.

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?

Another criticism:

Among Kennedy’s criticisms of the Danish study are that the analysis excluded children who had died before the age of two. According to Kennedy, this means that the children “most likely to reveal injuries” associated with aluminum exposure were excluded.

From the opinion piece:

The architects of this study meticulously designed it not to find harm. From the outset, Andersson et al. excluded the very children most likely to reveal injuries associated with high exposures to aluminum adjuvants in childhood vaccines. The exclusion included all children who died before age two, those diagnosed early with respiratory conditions, and an astonishing 34,547 children — 2.8% of the study population — whose vaccination records showed the highest aluminum exposure levels.

I remember looking at some Lending Club loan statistics and their stated yields by Lending Club. I thought it was pretty good at the time. But then I noticed in fine print that from the historical yield calculations, they exclude any loans that defaulted within the first X months. That was not something I expected.

I could see why Lending Club excluded these, but what's the rationale, if true, of excluding some populations from the vaccine trial results?

yorwba• 11 months ago

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.

FireBeyond• 11 months ago

Kennedy might've preferred it

I know it’s not inherently what you were trying to day but frankly, who gives a fuck what Kennedy’s preference is? He has zero medical training, and has no hesitation latching on to garbage conspiracy theories like chem trails, showing his lack of critical thinking skillsthinking skills.

blackbear_• 11 months ago

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/

throwawayqqq11• 11 months ago

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?

tialaramex2• 11 months ago

You don't ever have placebo groups where we are confident that not intervening is unethical.

Because he had the same cancer I think Hank Green might have a video about this, but years ago when I got diagnosed with Hodgkins I read the data and there's no placebo trials because scientific medicine (and thus placebo trials) was invented after they had some initial working cures for Hodgkins. So any fool can see a "placebo" trial is just arbitrarily killing a bunch of people to check a box which is awful and they never performed one.

We still have excellent reason to believe Hodgkins would kill you because some people, despite being told what's wrong and that we can cure it, will say "No". Crazy, religious, I guess maybe in the US too poor (?) doesn't matter, they decline the cure and those people die, because cancer is bad for you.

But they're self-selecting and so do not constitute a placebo trial. It seems ludicrous, but in theory maybe they only die because they're crazy or poor or they believe God will cure them or something. We can't prove it ain't so.

We do still run trials, but they're not A vs Placebo, they take the existing "gold standard" treatment you would get if there wasn't a trial and they compare something they think could be better against that.

colingauvin• 11 months ago

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

aurizon• 11 months ago

Aluminium is a major component of most clays = in most water = evolutionarily harmless - unless you have a crooked legal system abetted by RFK Jr - who is probably killing many children via his position!

pseudoscienfist• 11 months ago

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

See how that doesn't make sense?

happymellon• 11 months ago

I try and avoid salt water.

abhinavk• 11 months ago

Elements and Compounds.

tim333• 11 months ago

We are talking ions in the blood, and chlorine ions are a standard component. In fact you'd have a problem if you didn't have them.

roland35• 11 months ago

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

mingus882• 11 months ago

Supplements, which by the way do not need any FDA approval or need to verify their claims to be sold.

Isn’t it a coincidence that the loudest voices against vaccines also earned their wealth peddling supplements on their shows?

https://roganrecs.com/supplements (Joe Rogan founded Onnit)

https://thealexjonesstore.com/collections/supplements

lithocarpus7• 11 months ago

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)

Henchman21• 11 months ago

You may not be a card-carrying anti-vaxxer, but you muddy the waters in such a way that you advance their position.

eggnet4• 11 months ago

We know aluminum accumulates in the brain at a rate that is indistinguishable between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

In other words, we know where the aluminum is not coming from, namely, vaccines.

https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...

Goullé JP, Grangeot-Keros L. Aluminum and vaccines: Current state of knowledge. Med Mal Infect 2020 Feb;50:16-21.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0399077X1...

Although aluminum at high doses can cause a variety of clinical manifestations, the quantity of aluminum in vaccines is too small to cause a direct toxic effect. Indeed, the quantity of aluminum in biological specimens from those receiving aluminum-containing vaccines is indistinguishable from unvaccinated subjects. The concern that aluminum in vaccines might be associated with a rare autoimmune disease called macrophagic myofasciitis has been refuted by previous studies.

baxtr• 11 months ago

Vaccines are an absolutely amazing invention. Anyone who wants to be blown away by what they’ve achieved for humanity can visit this site: https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination

libraryofbabel• 11 months ago

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.

adrr• 11 months ago

10X more aluminum in a muffin than a vaccine. Just like there is more mercury in a can off of solid tuna than there is in vaccine. Amount of disinformation around vaccines is staggering. Vaccines change your DNA etc. You know what permanently changes your DNA which can increases your cancer risk? Viral infections like HPV.

0ckpuppet• 11 months ago

no one is injecting muffins, or tuna fish

actionfromafar2• 11 months ago

Hey, don't knock it til you try it.

mingus882• 11 months ago

And nobody is eating vaccines.

You might be wondering what kind of nonsense I am spouting off. I’m wondering the same thing about these anti-vax arguments.

actionfromafar2• 11 months ago

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

RealStickman_• 11 months ago

I need to get more vaccines, my reception is still terrible in many situations.

ponector2• 11 months ago

Aren't there more gay liberals than ever?

lithocarpus7• 11 months ago

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.

gamblor9562• 11 months ago

Aluminum is excreted by the kidneys naturally. In order for aluminum to bioacculumate, the kidneys would have to be non-functional.

Infant kidneys may not be as efficient as adult kidneys, but any aluminum acquired through vaccines would still be excreted by the time they're able to talk.

jaybrendansmith• 11 months ago

RFK is a demon from hell ... just look in his eyes. I'm not a religious person, but the second coming is at hand. Joking, not joking.

stankerns• 11 months ago

In London on the year 1800. (Before vaccines) - of the babies born that year three fourths died before their first birthday - in London on the year 2020 of the babies born that year, only three tenths of one percent failed to reach their first birthday.

t0bia_s5• 11 months ago

In London in 1800 there was no soaps. Or drinking water in houses.

abenga• 11 months ago

Or vaccines.

soraminazuki2• 11 months ago

The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap-like materials dates back to around 2800 BC in ancient Babylon.
Knowledge of how to produce true soap emerged at some point between early mentions of proto-soaps and the first century AD.

Guess which came first, 2800 BC - 99 AD or 1800 AD?

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

zeristor• 11 months ago

Three fourths?

Do you mean three quarters?

Is using the word fourths common place?

kibibu• 11 months ago

Yes, particularly in American English.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=three+fourths/...

jjav• 11 months ago

Very common, the fracion is 3/4, that's three fourths.

RFK Jr demanded a vaccine study be retracted – the journal said no

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