In 1910, diphtheria killed over 1,300 New Yorkers. Vaccines reduced that mortality rate by more than 99% with the help of aluminum salts that were added as an adjuvant — literally, “helper.” Today, a number of U.S. childhood vaccines — including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-containing vaccines, Haemophilus influenzae type b, HPV, meningococcal B and pneumococcal vaccines — contain aluminum adjuvants.
Now, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, including many involved in the organization he founded, Children’s Health Defense, where he served as chair from 2015 to 2023 and which focuses on anti-vaccine activism, appear to be orchestrating a strategic attack on aluminum-containing vaccines.
To understand what’s happening now, we need to look back to the U.K. in the 1990s, when then-physician Andrew Wakefield falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism while being paid by an anti-vaccine lawyer.
To understand what’s happening now, we need to look back to the U.K. in the 1990s, when then-physician Andrew Wakefield falsely linked the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism while being paid by an anti-vaccine lawyer. He was ultimately stripped of his medical license in 2010 for failing to disclose his financial interests and for performing unauthorized research on children — while raising money for a startup that relied on this research.
Around the same time in the U.S., a mercury-containing preservative called Thimerosal was attacked by anti-vaccine activists such as the then president of Children’s Health Defense, Lyn Redwood, and Barbara Loe Fisher through the National Vaccine Information Center (an organization that the Media Bias/Fact Check website called “a quackery-level anti-vaccination organization”). The center was co-founded by Fisher and supported by the philanthropist Claire Dwoskin, who is known for supporting debunked theories that vaccines cause autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
In both cases, international epidemiologists sprung into action and examined large databases of patient data, finding no association between the MMR vaccine or Thimerosal and autism.
Aluminum adjuvants appear to be the next logical target. Linking aluminum as a cause of autism — and possibly other chronic diseases — in scientific literature could help unleash lawsuits on a massive scale, thus paving a way to profit.
That’s because lawyers specializing in vaccine litigation stand to get extremely rich when they win lawsuits against vaccine providers. These lawyers typically work with patients claiming vaccine injuries on a contingency basis — the lawyers only get paid if they win the case, in which case they may keep 33% to 40% of the patient’s award.
Kennedy was previously such a lawyer. He served as co-counsel on lawsuits brought by a vaccine litigation firm Wisner-Baum against Merck, the maker of Gardasil, an HPV vaccine that contains aluminum. Since 2020, Children’s’ Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy founded, has filed nearly 30 lawsuits challenging vaccines and public health mandates.
“Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said during Kennedy’s confirmation hearings earlier this year. Warren predicted that “several changes Kennedy could make that might enrich him in connection with such lawsuits if he is approved as health secretary. That includes appointing anti-vaccine advocates to vaccine advisory panels, removing vaccines from recommendations or changing the way the vaccine injury compensation program works.”
It feels important to note that science does not support aluminum as a culprit of autism. At high doses aluminum is a neurotoxin, which is poisonous to the nervous system. But a major new study by Danish researchers makes us more confident than ever that aluminum adjuvant does not cause problems in children.
Dr. Anders Hviid and colleagues from Statens Serum Institut — Denmark’s version of the CDC — analyzed data from over 1.2 million Danish children, comparing their total aluminum dose to their risk of 50 chronic diseases, including autism. The study found no associations.
Vaccines were, once again, shown to be safe.
But Kennedy and his associates appear to be pursuing a different result, and apparently have been for years.
In 2007, Dr. Christopher Shaw, a Canadian neuroscientist and ophthalmologist, published a study claiming that aluminum injections cause neurological damage in mice. There are now many such papers describing aluminum-induced ailments in mice and even patients. Curiously, most came from about a dozen international researchers, described by one of them as the “aluminum family.” They have good scientific credentials and publish in respectable journals, as exemplified by the Israeli autoimmune researcher Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, a senior member of the cohort.
But consider this — Shoenfeld had 12 patients swallow whole, live worms “like macaroni” to treat autoimmune disease. The results were “marvelous,” he announced in an Israeli TV interview promoting his company, while a preposterous banner read “TPCera” — Shoenfeld’s startup — “finds treatment for all autoimmune disorders” (of which there are over 100). Shaw had a paper retracted by scientific publisher Elsevier “due to evidence of incorrect data.” Another senior member of this group, British chemist Dr. Christopher Exley (who coined the term “aluminum family”), engaged in cherry-picking when he reported that brain tissue in patients with autism contains more aluminum than in patients without autism — yet failed to mention a prior, far larger, study that found no difference.
Kennedy recently proclaimed an “epidemic of autism starting in 1989” — a necessary premise to make the link to increasing use of aluminum-containing vaccines in the 1980s.
The first notable connection between anti-vaccine and aluminum researchers appears to be when Wakefield, who moved to Texas in 2001 to continue autism research, called Shaw in 2008 with an offer to collaborate, according to Shaw’s book, “Dispatches From the Vaccine Wars.”
Next, Dwoskin approached Shaw. In January 2011, the “aluminum family” gathered on Dwoskin’s tropical estate in Jamaica, as Shaw recalls in his book. It’s clear from the conference video and agenda that this gathering was opened not by a scientist, as would be typical for scientific gatherings, but by Fisher, an activist with no science training. She laid out a research agenda that included investigating “biological damage vaccines could be doing.” Wakefield did as well, in a presentation titled, “Autism & Vaccines: A Research Strategy Focused on Cause.” Also in attendance was Vicky Pebsworth, recently appointed by Kennedy to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The meeting led to many collaborations, according to a conference YouTube testimonial. A few months later, a documentary sponsored by Dwoskin featured Shaw voicing over a cartoon of a mouse injected with an aluminum adjuvant, leading to aluminum spreading inside its brain. Wakefield was listed in the acknowledgements.
Starting in 2011, research papers from “the aluminum family” are shown to be sponsored by Dwoskin and Fisher. Kennedy personally offered financial support to Exley, as Exley describes in his recent book (Exley’s institution declined Kennedy’s sponsorship). Another member of the group now works for Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense, and another was a guest on its podcast.
Behind all these details is a potentially troubling link between the anti-aluminum agenda and potential money and influence for those fighting to push back against vaccine science.
The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act established a simplified compensation process for vaccine injury claims, funded by a tax on vaccines. This was a win for patients — both by making compensation easier to get, and by forestalling a mass exit of pharmaceutical companies from the vaccine market due to unsustainably expensive litigation.
There was one group, however, that suffered: the lawyers. Instead of the customary 30% fee, the act only permits “reasonable attorneys’ fees.” But there is an exception: if manufacturers knew of a risk but failed to disclose it.
In 2016, Wakefield repeated his U.K. playbook and along with his new colleague, Del Bigtree, CEO of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, partnered with two antivax lawyers: Kennedy and Aaron Siri.
In June 2017, Shaw, Exley and another senior member of the “aluminum family,” a French neuropathologist, Romain Gherardi, provided letters to Bigtree supporting the aluminum-autism link. Bigtree used these letters in petitions to the HHS, filed with Kennedy’s and Siri’s help, warning of the dangers of aluminum-containing vaccines.
Kennedy recently proclaimed an “epidemic of autism starting in 1989” — a necessary premise to make the link to increasing use of aluminum-containing vaccines in the 1980s.
In April, at the annual Autism Health Summit, Kennedy as HHS secretary announced plans to discover the cause of autism by September. He allocated a huge sum, $50 million, and announced a rushed competition for grant proposals due June 27, with work starting as early as Sept. 1. Given the tight timeline, applicants will almost certainly focus on analyzing a database of previously collected health records, rather than collecting new data.
Two individuals reportedly involved in setting up this database are National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and well-documented vaccine skeptic David Geier. Both have been accused of unethical research practices: Bhattacharya failed to disclose a financial conflict, which was raised by an anonymous whistleblower filed with Stanford University (Bhattacharya described this accusation as “bizarre.”) Jessica Steier, a public health researcher who leads the nonprofit Science Literacy Lab, which scrutinizes research on high-profile health topics, said that research by Geier and his father is riddled with basic flaws and that the two have “demonstrated patterns of an anti-vaccine agenda.”
Should aluminum be “discovered” as a cause of autism, the findings will likely be passed on to the newly restaffed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and therefore a debunked conspiracy theory may well make its way into HHS-recognized science.
This brings us back to a potential financial advantage for lawyers bringing vaccine injury claims, as it could provide an easy “Gotcha!” moment, allowing lawyers to blame the manufacturers, and perhaps even the previous government, for not heeding their prior warnings. They could then unleash lawsuits, as former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb recently predicted.
The health department in June reportedly hired a law firm specializing in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, reportedly for its expertise to advise on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, prompting a concern from pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit that Kennedy may make it easier to “bring bogus lawsuits to civil court claiming vaccine injuries.”
Predictably, Child’s Health Defense promptly attacked the latest study from the Danish Ministry of Health. The organization quoted Exley, who “suspects the aluminum industry influenced the Danish researchers.” Child’s Health Defense has attacked Hviid in the past by concocting another, equally implausible influence: Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company that does not make vaccines.
If anti-vaccine activists successfully undermine aluminum-containing vaccines despite research findings like the Danish study, the consequences will be catastrophic.
Vaccine-preventable diseases — diphtheria, meningitis, hepatitis and cancers of the liver, cervix and penis — will bounce back, causing tremendous death and suffering. And rates of autism will remain unchanged, as they have for decades.
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