- Dietary aluminum and adjuncts share aluminum share a metabolic pathway.
- Dietary intake is significant compared to adjunct.
Ergo: Injection doesn't fundamentally change aluminum's safety profile from dietary
The basis for this conclusion is a fallacy of false equivalence. No straw man about it. While dietary aluminum and adjuncts eventually share a metabolic pathway. Their impact on the body, particularly around “heightened immune response” are not equivalent at all.
The article doesn’t argue that dietary and injected aluminum are equivalent in immune response. It clearly states injected aluminum is designed to trigger one.
What it argues is: despite different entry routes and local effects, the systemic safety profile, what actually matters for toxicity is unchanged. That’s not false equivalence; it’s distinguishing between its function and the risk
So yes, immune activation is different. But that doesn’t prove harm. And unless you can show that difference results in a net physiological danger, the safety claim still stands.
This isn’t about whether they act the same. It’s whether the injected dose is harmful. And the data says it isn’t.
I didn’t say that it proves harm. But you’re saying it proves safety by looking at a toxicology profile instead of the physiological impact.
I have no position on the safety of aluminum. I have a position on taking an otherwise informative and educational study, then wrapping it in a fallacious safety narrative.
Uour original “logical proof” tried to disprove the article’s safety claim by arguing that dietary ≠ injected aluminum due to immune response. And, now you’re saying you’re not claiming harm—just criticizing how the article frames safety.
Ok, fair enough, but calling it a false equivalence fallacy still misses the mark. The article doesn’t conflate function, (immune activation) with systemic safety. It explicitly separates the two and supports its safety claim with toxicokinetic data, not some form of hand waving.
If your position is that the safety narrative is overconfident or overstated, that’s a fair critique. But that’s not a logical fallacy, it’s a debate about framing, not reasoning.
And yet your findings were binary. Aluminum adjuncts are safe as opposed to unsafe. Why is that appropriate where calling BS on a fallacy is inappropriate?
You’re free to locate the logical error in the proof but quit gaslighting to obfuscate the fact that you’re presenting propoganda as science.
P2: Injected aluminum is the same as dietary aluminum
are both only partially “correct”. There is much additional context here and the situation is hardly as clear cut. Therefore the logical conclusion drawn is invalid, and the logical proof presented is flawed.
The conclusion C: injected aluminium is safe is indeed correct, but it is not based upon the premises offered.
Fair point—P1 and P2 were oversimplified. That’s exactly why the original proof fails. It built a logical case on misrepresented premises the article never claimed.
The article doesn’t say injected aluminum is safe because it’s the same as dietary, it says it’s safe because its low dosage, cleared efficiently, and it’s
backed by data.
So if the logic was flawed but the conclusion is correct, we can agree that the proof was a swing and a miss.
Injected is not the same as ingested for the reasons stated. However, this does not make it dangerous. You are making a strawman argument and misrepresenting what is being said.
No they are making a straw-man argument about why dietary aluminum is equivalent to injected adjuvant aluminum.
This is a verbal coin behind the ear and you fail utterly at basic logic to read this article and nod.
Educational about the important role aluminum plays in vaccination, yes.
Conclusions drawn about injectable safety being analogous to dietary safety are off the rails.
As a doctor you should understand the seriousness of heightened immune responses. I have LADA and my son died from it. Shame on you. How much did you get paid to weave the safety narrative into your otherwise educational article?
There isn't a contradiction here. The aluminum obtained in diet does not occur in a predominantly crystalline form (as it does for the adjuvant) and the encounters with the low pH environment of the stomach liberates much more aluminum ions much more readily than physiological pH with intramuscular injections. Furthermore, a major aspect to the adjuvant action of aluminum relies on its crystalline nature because the crystals cause local irritation that promote an immune response. They also help to enhance immunity by controlling the orientation of the antigen so that the critical parts of it are exposed to antibodies, and they also help to increase clustering of the antigen which promotes a robust B cell response.
I would suggest that you ask questions to experts before making assumptions that they are wrong and acting in bad faith.
You don’t understand how these two statements are contradictory:
-“the aluminum injected with a vaccine isn’t significant compared to your daily dietary intake”
-“the aluminum is required in order to get a heightened response from the immune system”
If your daily dietary intake was equivalent then that would cause a heightened immune response daily and there wouldn’t be a need for aluminum injected the shot.
This fails all logical scrutiny. I throughly detest propaganda disguised as science.
LOL ok you read it, you just failed to comprehend it, got it! "propaganda" classic line when all else fails, am I right? Right up there with "follow the money!1!"
Did you miss that soluble salts are absorbed from food, whereas the salts used in vaccines have low solubility and are slowly broken down?
The pathways are completely different. The vaccine is given IM or SC, local immune cells pick it up and take it back to the draining lymph node where memory lymphocytes 'remember' it for next time. The aluminum salts promote this chain of events.
Aluminum in food is mostly passed straight through. A small percentage, in the form of some of the soluble salts, is absorbed. It is promptly carried off to the kidneys in the systemic circulation, and excreted in the urine.
The adjuvanted immune response is confined to the local area of injection and regional lymph nodes; there is no heightened risk for systemic autoimmune diseases.
Actually, it's the chemical and physical form of the aluminum that is important. Aluminum itself does not generate an immune response on its own. The antigens in the vaccine generate the response. At the injection site, the aluminum compounds are just helping the response (they're adjuvants). An adjuvant such as aluminum hydroxide is very insoluble in water, and it will slow down the release of antigens at the injection site because it cannot be dispersed quickly. It physically takes more time. Without the adjuvant, the antigens would be dispersed too quickly for an effective immune response to occur (or at least it will be weaker). In other words, the aluminum adjuvant gives the immune system more time to notice and respond to an antigen.
The aluminum you consume through food or drink will be converted into a different form (the Al3+ cation) if it doesn't already exist in that form...even if you consume the same form as the adjuvant. For example, aluminum hydroxide can act as an antacid because it reacts with stomach acid (becoming Al3+). This ionic form of aluminum cannot perform the same job as the adjuvant. The adjuvant at the injection site will also slowly react with acidic compounds in the cellular environment, but that will be a much slower process in comparison to the very fast reactions occurring in your stomach.
Ultimately, though, whether you ingest aluminum or receive it in a vaccine, it will end up in the same form (Al3+).
Aluminum adjuvant most certainly elicits a severe immune response on its own. (Look up immune studies). Aluminum adjuvant is crystallized aluminum. You could compare it to asbestos, another immune-stimulating crystal. Immune cells “freak out” and try to remove it. Aluminum in food and water is dissolved (non-crystallized) and only about 0.3% of ingested aluminum enters the bloodstream anyway; and even that is a completely different form of aluminum than adjuvant aluminum.
This article completely ignores the mountains of evidence against its (frankly ludicrous) hypothesis that injecting adjuvant aluminum is comparable to ingesting aluminum in food and water.
I might write a referenced, truly scientific rebuttal some day, but honestly “when being right is more important than doing what is right, people will ignore whatever evidence doesn’t support their preconceived notions.”
Thank you for your comment. You’re absolutely right that aluminium adjuvants are different from dietary aluminium, and scientists have known and studied that for decades. That’s precisely why we have extensive toxicological data, pharmacokinetics, and real-world safety studies specifically on injected aluminium adjuvants.
The comparison to asbestos is misplaced. Asbestos is a known carcinogen with a specific mechanism involving persistent fibre-like structures in the lungs. Aluminium salts used in vaccines are biodegradable compounds with well-characterised clearance pathways. The “crystals” you refer to are not biologically inert or comparable in structure, toxicity, or persistence to asbestos.
It’s also important to remember that adjuvants are added to stimulate an immune response safely and in a controlled way. That’s their job. What matters is the context: a small, localised response at the injection site that helps the immune system recognise and remember a fragment of a virus or bacterium. It’s a million miles from chronic immune overstimulation or gross systemic harm, and the vast bulk of peer-reviewed evidence bears this out.
You're welcome to write a rebuttal, but scientific consensus isn't based on passion or analogies—it's based on reproducible data, epidemiological findings, and safety surveillance involving millions of people. And on that front, aluminium-adjuvanted vaccines have been studied more thoroughly than most medical interventions in history.
Sometimes, doing what is right is trusting what the evidence actually shows—even when it’s less dramatic than we'd like.
And yet your statements that aluminum adjuncts are safe is based on a position of equivalence between dietary aluminum and adjuncts.
I’m not stirring the pot over a position on aluminum. I’m stirring the pot over using logical fallacies to tell people something is safe. That was almost certainly paid for.
If you forget everything you think you know about aluminum and go back through the actual literature with a beginner’s mind, I’m 100% confident you’ll uncover a different story about aluminum than what you’ve been told. The real story is certainly different from the one painted here in this article.
You say there is robust evidence for the safety of aluminum adjuvants. Okay. Show me compelling randomized placebo controlled trials with long term outcomes studies (everything from asthma to autoimmunity to developmental delays and ear infections) for injection of aluminum adjuvant into infants. They must be compared to a real saline placebo. I haven’t been able to find a single one. Can you find one? Let alone a robust set of them? Oh, and it must be one that wasn’t performed by the manufacturer themselves (because we all know that drug companies have a long and sordid history of concealing harms data for their products. Don’t let me go off on that one).
Can’t do it? Unethical, you say? Well, get creative. That’s the scientist's job. If aluminum is so safe, as you so confidently assert, maybe you can simply inject more of it into a substantial set of children and compare their long term health outcomes to the outcomes of “normally vaccinated” infants. Not ethical, you say? Why? Isn’t injecting aluminum into kids completely safe?
Until you can actually provide real data for your assertions (not just industry-funded "consensus" a-la-tobacco-industry), I’m not injecting that into my kids. If you want to, you can freely go inject yourself.
And you can point out the differences between asbestos and aluminum adjuvants and try to count that as proof there’s no comparison. Let me spell it out for you. Asbestos is composed of oxygen and silicon. Silicon is 27.7% of the Earth’s crust. Oxygen is 46% of the Earth’s crust. Aluminum is only 8%. According to the logic in this article, breathing asbestos should be completely harmless. But yet it’s not harmless. And injecting aluminum adjuvants into muscle tissue is not even close to being shown as harmless. Does this comparison make sense now?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. My intention isn’t to be right. It’s to protect the children. I hesitate to even suggest (as I did above) that you inject more aluminum into them as a “safety study.”
Go ahead and write that scientific rebuttal. Include all the evidence and studies to back up your claims. Science is all about evidence and data, after all.
None of that is here nor there. My comments aren’t about the safety of aluminum adjuncts. It’s about the utterly fallacious position the article takes on that subject.
Absolutely false. There is proven increased risk of autoimmune disease from various vaccines. It’s all over pubmed. Don’t rely on mainstream media to show you those studies.
Thanks for sharing Mike. The first article here is a conjectural hypothesis attacking a fairly well founded phenomenon called ASIA. Look up ASIA and read more papers in addition to this one. The commentaries responding to this article are a good place to start.
The second article you shared here is diplomatically saying “we don’t know what the hell happens when we inject aluminum but we really hope it’s safe.”
I can tell you’re sincere and that you care about human health. Thank you for your contributions and I wish you a splendid week. You’re an awesome guy, Mike.
It’s a construct invented by Schoenfeld who has pushed several pseudoscientific publications about it into the scientific literature.
No decent immunologist accepts his hypotheses.
Aside from using PubMed, something I clearly do despite your suggestion that I don’t, I also look at comments to various articles, but find the arguments of many contributors [often non medical] unconvincing. In addition I appreciate that on controversial topics those who are motivated to chip in are often a committed core of true believers in the phenomenon being debunked.
So there is a base rate fallacy at work; counting the absolute numbers of responses doesn’t reflect the real prevalence of opinion among
Just bc they're scientists? LOL nah fam, you should be able to draw your own conclusions based on scientists who are EXPERTS in this field, especially when they spoon feed you the source material to be able to decide for yourself. They made this really easy for you. Maybe read the article?
"propaganda" again lol Pot, meet kettle. I don't have "beliefs" I have knowledge from reading and comprehending. Your definition of "logic" also needs improvement.
Well when what they’re presenting ring isn’t science — trusting what they say is foolish.
Look they had a great informational article and then they had to agendaize it.
I am a scientist. Not in biology but the same principles apply. Scientists welcome scrutiny. They don’t have to gaslight unless their flaws were deliberate.
This article misrepresents the “injection vs ingested” argument from vaccine skeptics. The digestive system filters out 99.9% of orally ingested aluminum. When you inject aluminum, there is no digestive system filtering going on, so all of the aluminum will end up in the bloodstream, as this article tacitly admits.
Also as others have pointed out, if the amount of aluminum in the vaccines is no different than the amount in consumed food, then why do you even need the aluminum in the vaccine? Shouldn’t the amount in food be enough to stimulate an immune response?
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how aluminium adjuvants work. When aluminium salts are injected as part of a vaccine, they do not go directly into the bloodstream. Instead, they remain at the injection site in muscle tissue, where they form a depot that slowly releases antigens and stimulates an immune response over time.
The aluminium is mostly taken up by immune cells (like macrophages), not dumped straight into the blood. Yes, the gastrointestinal (GI) absorption rate for aluminium is very low (~0.1–0.3%). However, this is precisely why dietary aluminium exposure, though high in quantity, results in low systemic absorption. In contrast, only a very small amount of aluminium is present in vaccines (typically 0.125 to 0.85 mg), and it is slowly absorbed from the injection site over weeks or months. This gradual uptake allows the body to clear it efficiently via the kidneys.
Key point: You must compare systemic bioavailable aluminium, not just total exposure, to understand safety.
Aluminium is not in vaccines to mimic dietary exposure; this is a misuse of an analogy. — It is there as an adjuvant to stimulate a stronger and more durable immune response to the antigen in the vaccine. The aluminium in food doesn’t do that, because it’s not presented with antigens in a way the immune system can recognise and react to.
You appear to assume that because aluminium is injected and not filtered by digestion, it must be more dangerous. But this ignores:
The form of aluminium (aluminium salts are poorly soluble).
The dose (very small).
The kinetics of absorption (slow, not immediate).
The route of clearance (primarily renal).
This is why studies consistently show no evidence of harm from aluminium adjuvants in vaccines in healthy individuals.
This is not a misrepresentation. The low bioavailability of aluminum by the PO route does not negate the fact that there is proportionally many orders of magnitude more exposure to aluminum-containing substances through the environment than there is from the vaccines, even with 100% bioavailability of the aluminum ions in their injected form (given infinite time as release from the injection site is very slow because of the pH and generally poor solubility of aluminum salts).
To stimulate an immune response with aluminum salts, you need the antigens (the thing you want the immune system to make a response against) to be present together with the crystalline salts and adsorbed onto it. This does several things:
- The crystals themselves are locally irritating and cause the release of danger molecules that indicate to the immune system that a response is warranted. The discrete antigens lack the intrinsic ability to look dangerous to the immune system, which is why multiple vaccines do not work without adjuvants like aluminum.
- By adsorbing onto the crystals, the molecules of the antigen cluster closely together. This allows for a more effective immune response because it allows the antigen to cross-link surface receptors present on B cells which promotes their differentiation into antibody secreting cells.
These effects are irrelevant to the solvated aluminum ion, which is the highly reactive species that is thought to account for the toxic effects of aluminum. Both diet and vaccination create an opportunity for exposure to the aluminum ion toxicant, but neither approximates the doses at which toxicity occurs, and in fact despite the poor bioavailability of aluminum from sources like food, the exposure to this toxic species is much greater than that contributed by vaccines.
The misrepresentation in ingested vs. injected is that the toxicological properties of the aluminum fundamentally change through the route of exposure. This is not true. The only thing that changes is the amount you are exposed to.
The injected crystals can last inside macrophages >1.5 years and promote apoptosis and necrosis of tissue. Add a stress environment dated outside the term limit of a safety study and then SUMOylation which can reactivate EBV and transactivate superinfected viral proteins. Put them together and you get a beautiful and complex immjne response that cannot decipher between the two viruses. The mixed components can be recognized as autoantigens (i.e., autoimmunity). In the case or organ transplantation, rejection of donor tissue- I just published that. Next question?
My question: On Paul Offit's site you told me - in effect - you resent being treated as if you are an "unintelligent anti-vaxxer." You obviously had a point to make, and a new paper to support it. Why not make your response accessible to the average reader, rather than assume the position of the arrogant asshole and be ignored?
It has been made accessible. It's open-access and I've posted it several places. When I see physician's arrogant snips, that are potentially deceiving to the public, I have been tending to respond to make them reconsider that the story is not over yet, including the link and to be more open-minded. Some have asked for more information. I don't typically consider my responses to be acting like an asshole except when someone starts calling me names to begin engaging and pointing out to the public that I am just a crank to be ignored until scientific "consensus" catches up with the reality of the data. If that's considered being an asshole, so be it. Some your own posting start out with similar pre-judging and rather debasing snippets. Neither of us see the whole picture, but without having the freedom to dialogue, simply because it has to follow certain protocols in people's minds, it is easy for the public to "rest easy" in a narrative that makes them secure. Insecurity can induce fear or anger, or be a motivation to search for more details. My goal is the latter. I'm sure I don't need to lecture you on that.
And in Paul's case, I spent week's preparing an hour presentation he invited me into his office for, then gave me 15 minutes, for which I took 20 seconds to consolidate everything and showed him 1 piece of data out of much more. He sent me off with an article and told me to come back when I had more data. The article he gave me was the solitary evidence for H1N1 vaccine implication to narcolepsy. But no evidence if molecular mimicry. After I was fired, I figured out the epitope from EBV and H1N1. It completely blocks the orexin receptor. His narcissism isn't evident to the public. He can be a really nice person. But he doesn't stray from his narrative. Brilliant in some ways, short-sighted and unwilling to change in others. If course, when your career rides on consistency, I get that. Except it was very publuc that he didn't have his son get the boosters because of the association with cardiomyopathy. No one ever heard an explanation for that. And then I found what no one else did... the only viral protein to have more of a certain type of modification site than EBV gp350 is SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. I wasn't allowed to publish that either. The publisher of my paper wouldn't even allow me to make the comparison in the figure I included. No conspiracy there, just comparison. But it reeks of something no one else ever pointed out. That didn't happen naturally.
The digestive system actually ignores most dietary Al, rather than filtering it. It goes straight through.
The aluminum in an adjuvant does not all "end up" in the bloodstream at once. Because the Al salts used as adjuvants are poorly soluble, the Al is released slowly. Prompt excretion by the kidneys means that an Al adjuvant has negligible effect on circulating Al.
This article completely misunderstands and misrepresents toxicology. Even the conclusions from the cherry picked articles conflict with the article data. One cited article even showed that kids with higher hair aluminum have poorer motor development- yet this isn’t acknowledged in this article.
This kind of misrepresentation of science is precisely why people don’t trust the medical establishment anymore.
As a double Board-certified toxicologist, I disagree. The article does not misunderstand or misrepresent toxicology. I look forward to your explanation of how it misunderstands or misrepresents toxicology. I could do with a good laugh.
Thank you for this clearly-written deep dive!
Quick report to say my scouring of the NLM for evidence of "aluminum adjuvants and argumentativeness" has met with slow going
Okay for the logically impaired:
Logical Proof: Fallacy in Equating Dietary and Injected Aluminum
================================================================
Definitions:
------------
Let:
A_d = Dietary aluminum (oral intake)
A_i = Injected aluminum (e.g., in vaccines)
S(x) = "x is safe for human use"
H(x) = "x causes a heightened immune response"
E(x, y) = "x is physiologically equivalent to y"
Premises:
---------
P1: S(A_d)
// Dietary aluminum is safe
P2: E(A_i, A_d)
// Injected aluminum is the same as dietary aluminum
P3: S(A_d) => S(A_i)
// If dietary aluminum is safe, then injected aluminum is safe
// (based on assumed equivalence in P2)
P4: H(A_i)
// Injected aluminum causes a heightened immune response (as an adjuvant)
P5: ~H(A_d)
// Dietary aluminum does NOT cause a heightened immune response
Logical Steps:
--------------
L1: From P2, we assume E(A_i, A_d)
L2: But from P4 and P5, we get:
H(A_i) ∧ ~H(A_d) => ~E(A_i, A_d)
// Their immune response effects are different, so they are not equivalent
Contradiction:
--------------
C1: P2 (E(A_i, A_d)) contradicts L2 (~E(A_i, A_d))
=> Contradiction: assumption of equivalence is false
Conclusion:
-----------
- The claim that A_i = A_d is false
- Therefore, P3 (S(A_d) => S(A_i)) is based on a false equivalence
- The argument that injected aluminum is safe *because* dietary aluminum is safe
is logically invalid.
Thus, the article's reasoning contains a fallacy of false equivalence.
You’re attacking a straw man…
The article never claims injected and ingested aluminum are the same. It explicitly says they’re different in form, route, and purpose.
What it argues is that despite those differences, the tiny amount in vaccines is safely processed and cleared, which is backed by actual data.
You’ve disproven a claim no one made. Difference ≠ danger. If you want to argue risk, show harm—not just that they’re not identical.
The subheading and the synopsis:
- Dietary aluminum and adjuncts share aluminum share a metabolic pathway.
- Dietary intake is significant compared to adjunct.
Ergo: Injection doesn't fundamentally change aluminum's safety profile from dietary
The basis for this conclusion is a fallacy of false equivalence. No straw man about it. While dietary aluminum and adjuncts eventually share a metabolic pathway. Their impact on the body, particularly around “heightened immune response” are not equivalent at all.
You’re still missing the point.
The article doesn’t argue that dietary and injected aluminum are equivalent in immune response. It clearly states injected aluminum is designed to trigger one.
What it argues is: despite different entry routes and local effects, the systemic safety profile, what actually matters for toxicity is unchanged. That’s not false equivalence; it’s distinguishing between its function and the risk
So yes, immune activation is different. But that doesn’t prove harm. And unless you can show that difference results in a net physiological danger, the safety claim still stands.
This isn’t about whether they act the same. It’s whether the injected dose is harmful. And the data says it isn’t.
I didn’t say that it proves harm. But you’re saying it proves safety by looking at a toxicology profile instead of the physiological impact.
I have no position on the safety of aluminum. I have a position on taking an otherwise informative and educational study, then wrapping it in a fallacious safety narrative.
Then we’re back to where this all started.
Uour original “logical proof” tried to disprove the article’s safety claim by arguing that dietary ≠ injected aluminum due to immune response. And, now you’re saying you’re not claiming harm—just criticizing how the article frames safety.
Ok, fair enough, but calling it a false equivalence fallacy still misses the mark. The article doesn’t conflate function, (immune activation) with systemic safety. It explicitly separates the two and supports its safety claim with toxicokinetic data, not some form of hand waving.
If your position is that the safety narrative is overconfident or overstated, that’s a fair critique. But that’s not a logical fallacy, it’s a debate about framing, not reasoning.
Your premises are incorrect.
You are trying to force the evidence to fit a binary conclusion when this is not appropriate. This is a false dichotomy.
And yet your findings were binary. Aluminum adjuncts are safe as opposed to unsafe. Why is that appropriate where calling BS on a fallacy is inappropriate?
You’re free to locate the logical error in the proof but quit gaslighting to obfuscate the fact that you’re presenting propoganda as science.
I located the logical error in the “proof”.
Doing so is hardly gaslighting you, unless you are a really fragile snowflake.
But you didn’t. You said you did but did not demonstrate.
Both of the premises
P1: Dietary aluminum is safe
P2: Injected aluminum is the same as dietary aluminum
are both only partially “correct”. There is much additional context here and the situation is hardly as clear cut. Therefore the logical conclusion drawn is invalid, and the logical proof presented is flawed.
The conclusion C: injected aluminium is safe is indeed correct, but it is not based upon the premises offered.
I have explained elsewhere.
Fair point—P1 and P2 were oversimplified. That’s exactly why the original proof fails. It built a logical case on misrepresented premises the article never claimed.
The article doesn’t say injected aluminum is safe because it’s the same as dietary, it says it’s safe because its low dosage, cleared efficiently, and it’s
backed by data.
So if the logic was flawed but the conclusion is correct, we can agree that the proof was a swing and a miss.
Reference Christopher Exley PhD. (bioinorganic Chemistry).
He has studied aluminum’s MOA for nearly 50 years.
This is a matter of biochemistry, not medicine.
Okay so in summary:
Aluminum injected with a vaccine is no different than normal daily intake
AND
The vaccine wouldn’t work without trigger a heightened immune response that doesn’t happen with daily oral intake.
So completely contradictory — and heightened immune responses don’t do things like trigger auto immune disease (sarcasm)
Injected is not the same as ingested for the reasons stated. However, this does not make it dangerous. You are making a strawman argument and misrepresenting what is being said.
No they are making a straw-man argument about why dietary aluminum is equivalent to injected adjuvant aluminum.
This is a verbal coin behind the ear and you fail utterly at basic logic to read this article and nod.
Educational about the important role aluminum plays in vaccination, yes.
Conclusions drawn about injectable safety being analogous to dietary safety are off the rails.
As a doctor you should understand the seriousness of heightened immune responses. I have LADA and my son died from it. Shame on you. How much did you get paid to weave the safety narrative into your otherwise educational article?
There isn't a contradiction here. The aluminum obtained in diet does not occur in a predominantly crystalline form (as it does for the adjuvant) and the encounters with the low pH environment of the stomach liberates much more aluminum ions much more readily than physiological pH with intramuscular injections. Furthermore, a major aspect to the adjuvant action of aluminum relies on its crystalline nature because the crystals cause local irritation that promote an immune response. They also help to enhance immunity by controlling the orientation of the antigen so that the critical parts of it are exposed to antibodies, and they also help to increase clustering of the antigen which promotes a robust B cell response.
I would suggest that you ask questions to experts before making assumptions that they are wrong and acting in bad faith.
Please explain how these 2 things are contradictory. Did you read the entire post?
I did.
You don’t understand how these two statements are contradictory:
-“the aluminum injected with a vaccine isn’t significant compared to your daily dietary intake”
-“the aluminum is required in order to get a heightened response from the immune system”
If your daily dietary intake was equivalent then that would cause a heightened immune response daily and there wouldn’t be a need for aluminum injected the shot.
This fails all logical scrutiny. I throughly detest propaganda disguised as science.
LOL ok you read it, you just failed to comprehend it, got it! "propaganda" classic line when all else fails, am I right? Right up there with "follow the money!1!"
…Missed the bit about the adjuvant remaining local (and stimulating a localised response), did you?
Did you miss that soluble salts are absorbed from food, whereas the salts used in vaccines have low solubility and are slowly broken down?
The pathways are completely different. The vaccine is given IM or SC, local immune cells pick it up and take it back to the draining lymph node where memory lymphocytes 'remember' it for next time. The aluminum salts promote this chain of events.
Aluminum in food is mostly passed straight through. A small percentage, in the form of some of the soluble salts, is absorbed. It is promptly carried off to the kidneys in the systemic circulation, and excreted in the urine.
This only substantiates my position.
If you understood physiology, chemistry, ADME, or immunology, it wouldn't.
There are more processes in the body than are dreamed of in your philosophy.
You’re just strengthening the fallacy of false equivalence.
The adjuvanted immune response is confined to the local area of injection and regional lymph nodes; there is no heightened risk for systemic autoimmune diseases.
So the adjuvant causes an immune response in the body that dietary aluminum doesn’t? Yes/No
If yes then:
It’s fallacious to say that the adjucant’s localized heightened immune response is no different than dietary aluminum?
Yes/No
Actually, it's the chemical and physical form of the aluminum that is important. Aluminum itself does not generate an immune response on its own. The antigens in the vaccine generate the response. At the injection site, the aluminum compounds are just helping the response (they're adjuvants). An adjuvant such as aluminum hydroxide is very insoluble in water, and it will slow down the release of antigens at the injection site because it cannot be dispersed quickly. It physically takes more time. Without the adjuvant, the antigens would be dispersed too quickly for an effective immune response to occur (or at least it will be weaker). In other words, the aluminum adjuvant gives the immune system more time to notice and respond to an antigen.
The aluminum you consume through food or drink will be converted into a different form (the Al3+ cation) if it doesn't already exist in that form...even if you consume the same form as the adjuvant. For example, aluminum hydroxide can act as an antacid because it reacts with stomach acid (becoming Al3+). This ionic form of aluminum cannot perform the same job as the adjuvant. The adjuvant at the injection site will also slowly react with acidic compounds in the cellular environment, but that will be a much slower process in comparison to the very fast reactions occurring in your stomach.
Ultimately, though, whether you ingest aluminum or receive it in a vaccine, it will end up in the same form (Al3+).
Right back to false equivalence.
Aluminum adjuvant most certainly elicits a severe immune response on its own. (Look up immune studies). Aluminum adjuvant is crystallized aluminum. You could compare it to asbestos, another immune-stimulating crystal. Immune cells “freak out” and try to remove it. Aluminum in food and water is dissolved (non-crystallized) and only about 0.3% of ingested aluminum enters the bloodstream anyway; and even that is a completely different form of aluminum than adjuvant aluminum.
This article completely ignores the mountains of evidence against its (frankly ludicrous) hypothesis that injecting adjuvant aluminum is comparable to ingesting aluminum in food and water.
I might write a referenced, truly scientific rebuttal some day, but honestly “when being right is more important than doing what is right, people will ignore whatever evidence doesn’t support their preconceived notions.”
Thank you for your comment. You’re absolutely right that aluminium adjuvants are different from dietary aluminium, and scientists have known and studied that for decades. That’s precisely why we have extensive toxicological data, pharmacokinetics, and real-world safety studies specifically on injected aluminium adjuvants.
The comparison to asbestos is misplaced. Asbestos is a known carcinogen with a specific mechanism involving persistent fibre-like structures in the lungs. Aluminium salts used in vaccines are biodegradable compounds with well-characterised clearance pathways. The “crystals” you refer to are not biologically inert or comparable in structure, toxicity, or persistence to asbestos.
It’s also important to remember that adjuvants are added to stimulate an immune response safely and in a controlled way. That’s their job. What matters is the context: a small, localised response at the injection site that helps the immune system recognise and remember a fragment of a virus or bacterium. It’s a million miles from chronic immune overstimulation or gross systemic harm, and the vast bulk of peer-reviewed evidence bears this out.
You're welcome to write a rebuttal, but scientific consensus isn't based on passion or analogies—it's based on reproducible data, epidemiological findings, and safety surveillance involving millions of people. And on that front, aluminium-adjuvanted vaccines have been studied more thoroughly than most medical interventions in history.
Sometimes, doing what is right is trusting what the evidence actually shows—even when it’s less dramatic than we'd like.
And yet your statements that aluminum adjuncts are safe is based on a position of equivalence between dietary aluminum and adjuncts.
I’m not stirring the pot over a position on aluminum. I’m stirring the pot over using logical fallacies to tell people something is safe. That was almost certainly paid for.
If you forget everything you think you know about aluminum and go back through the actual literature with a beginner’s mind, I’m 100% confident you’ll uncover a different story about aluminum than what you’ve been told. The real story is certainly different from the one painted here in this article.
You say there is robust evidence for the safety of aluminum adjuvants. Okay. Show me compelling randomized placebo controlled trials with long term outcomes studies (everything from asthma to autoimmunity to developmental delays and ear infections) for injection of aluminum adjuvant into infants. They must be compared to a real saline placebo. I haven’t been able to find a single one. Can you find one? Let alone a robust set of them? Oh, and it must be one that wasn’t performed by the manufacturer themselves (because we all know that drug companies have a long and sordid history of concealing harms data for their products. Don’t let me go off on that one).
Can’t do it? Unethical, you say? Well, get creative. That’s the scientist's job. If aluminum is so safe, as you so confidently assert, maybe you can simply inject more of it into a substantial set of children and compare their long term health outcomes to the outcomes of “normally vaccinated” infants. Not ethical, you say? Why? Isn’t injecting aluminum into kids completely safe?
Until you can actually provide real data for your assertions (not just industry-funded "consensus" a-la-tobacco-industry), I’m not injecting that into my kids. If you want to, you can freely go inject yourself.
And you can point out the differences between asbestos and aluminum adjuvants and try to count that as proof there’s no comparison. Let me spell it out for you. Asbestos is composed of oxygen and silicon. Silicon is 27.7% of the Earth’s crust. Oxygen is 46% of the Earth’s crust. Aluminum is only 8%. According to the logic in this article, breathing asbestos should be completely harmless. But yet it’s not harmless. And injecting aluminum adjuvants into muscle tissue is not even close to being shown as harmless. Does this comparison make sense now?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. My intention isn’t to be right. It’s to protect the children. I hesitate to even suggest (as I did above) that you inject more aluminum into them as a “safety study.”
Go ahead and write that scientific rebuttal. Include all the evidence and studies to back up your claims. Science is all about evidence and data, after all.
None of that is here nor there. My comments aren’t about the safety of aluminum adjuncts. It’s about the utterly fallacious position the article takes on that subject.
Absolutely false. There is proven increased risk of autoimmune disease from various vaccines. It’s all over pubmed. Don’t rely on mainstream media to show you those studies.
I have gone to PubMed. That’s where I get evidence like this:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28888842/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4615573/
Thanks for sharing Mike. The first article here is a conjectural hypothesis attacking a fairly well founded phenomenon called ASIA. Look up ASIA and read more papers in addition to this one. The commentaries responding to this article are a good place to start.
The second article you shared here is diplomatically saying “we don’t know what the hell happens when we inject aluminum but we really hope it’s safe.”
I can tell you’re sincere and that you care about human health. Thank you for your contributions and I wish you a splendid week. You’re an awesome guy, Mike.
“ASIA” isn’t “well founded”.
It’s a construct invented by Schoenfeld who has pushed several pseudoscientific publications about it into the scientific literature.
No decent immunologist accepts his hypotheses.
Aside from using PubMed, something I clearly do despite your suggestion that I don’t, I also look at comments to various articles, but find the arguments of many contributors [often non medical] unconvincing. In addition I appreciate that on controversial topics those who are motivated to chip in are often a committed core of true believers in the phenomenon being debunked.
So there is a base rate fallacy at work; counting the absolute numbers of responses doesn’t reflect the real prevalence of opinion among
Oh boy. You keep digging your hole deeper. Read the studies you cite before citing them at least ;)
Jason, you’re too logical. You’re supposed to just believe them because they’re a team of scientists.
Just bc they're scientists? LOL nah fam, you should be able to draw your own conclusions based on scientists who are EXPERTS in this field, especially when they spoon feed you the source material to be able to decide for yourself. They made this really easy for you. Maybe read the article?
I read the article as a Mensa card holder with a pre-med biochemistry degree thanks.
Well that makes it even worse, then. Sad.
See here’s the thing. You’re engaged in a conversation about vaccine safety. I’m engaged in a conversation about basic logic.
You’re either blinded by your beliefs, don’t understand the subject matter, or are part of the propaganda wagon.
"propaganda" again lol Pot, meet kettle. I don't have "beliefs" I have knowledge from reading and comprehending. Your definition of "logic" also needs improvement.
All you have to do to be a team of scientists is say “we’re a team of scientists”
All you have to do to eat as a team of scientists is get funded for a study.
All you have to do to get funded for a study is make sure the study favors the funder.
Trust the science people.
No, of course, don’t trust scientists on matters of science. Trust someone else instead…the fitness instructor at your gym, or the pool guy.
…Great advice. 🙄
Well when what they’re presenting ring isn’t science — trusting what they say is foolish.
Look they had a great informational article and then they had to agendaize it.
I am a scientist. Not in biology but the same principles apply. Scientists welcome scrutiny. They don’t have to gaslight unless their flaws were deliberate.
If you are looking for people “agendaizing” scientific info, you need look no further than Kennedy &Co.
Your claim that studies will be funded if they favour the funder may indeed apply with some Pharma-funded research.
Tell me, how and what did the NIH gain from the $47 billion it provided in funding each year.
This article misrepresents the “injection vs ingested” argument from vaccine skeptics. The digestive system filters out 99.9% of orally ingested aluminum. When you inject aluminum, there is no digestive system filtering going on, so all of the aluminum will end up in the bloodstream, as this article tacitly admits.
Also as others have pointed out, if the amount of aluminum in the vaccines is no different than the amount in consumed food, then why do you even need the aluminum in the vaccine? Shouldn’t the amount in food be enough to stimulate an immune response?
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how aluminium adjuvants work. When aluminium salts are injected as part of a vaccine, they do not go directly into the bloodstream. Instead, they remain at the injection site in muscle tissue, where they form a depot that slowly releases antigens and stimulates an immune response over time.
The aluminium is mostly taken up by immune cells (like macrophages), not dumped straight into the blood. Yes, the gastrointestinal (GI) absorption rate for aluminium is very low (~0.1–0.3%). However, this is precisely why dietary aluminium exposure, though high in quantity, results in low systemic absorption. In contrast, only a very small amount of aluminium is present in vaccines (typically 0.125 to 0.85 mg), and it is slowly absorbed from the injection site over weeks or months. This gradual uptake allows the body to clear it efficiently via the kidneys.
Key point: You must compare systemic bioavailable aluminium, not just total exposure, to understand safety.
Aluminium is not in vaccines to mimic dietary exposure; this is a misuse of an analogy. — It is there as an adjuvant to stimulate a stronger and more durable immune response to the antigen in the vaccine. The aluminium in food doesn’t do that, because it’s not presented with antigens in a way the immune system can recognise and react to.
You appear to assume that because aluminium is injected and not filtered by digestion, it must be more dangerous. But this ignores:
The form of aluminium (aluminium salts are poorly soluble).
The dose (very small).
The kinetics of absorption (slow, not immediate).
The route of clearance (primarily renal).
This is why studies consistently show no evidence of harm from aluminium adjuvants in vaccines in healthy individuals.
This is not a misrepresentation. The low bioavailability of aluminum by the PO route does not negate the fact that there is proportionally many orders of magnitude more exposure to aluminum-containing substances through the environment than there is from the vaccines, even with 100% bioavailability of the aluminum ions in their injected form (given infinite time as release from the injection site is very slow because of the pH and generally poor solubility of aluminum salts).
To stimulate an immune response with aluminum salts, you need the antigens (the thing you want the immune system to make a response against) to be present together with the crystalline salts and adsorbed onto it. This does several things:
- The crystals themselves are locally irritating and cause the release of danger molecules that indicate to the immune system that a response is warranted. The discrete antigens lack the intrinsic ability to look dangerous to the immune system, which is why multiple vaccines do not work without adjuvants like aluminum.
- By adsorbing onto the crystals, the molecules of the antigen cluster closely together. This allows for a more effective immune response because it allows the antigen to cross-link surface receptors present on B cells which promotes their differentiation into antibody secreting cells.
These effects are irrelevant to the solvated aluminum ion, which is the highly reactive species that is thought to account for the toxic effects of aluminum. Both diet and vaccination create an opportunity for exposure to the aluminum ion toxicant, but neither approximates the doses at which toxicity occurs, and in fact despite the poor bioavailability of aluminum from sources like food, the exposure to this toxic species is much greater than that contributed by vaccines.
The misrepresentation in ingested vs. injected is that the toxicological properties of the aluminum fundamentally change through the route of exposure. This is not true. The only thing that changes is the amount you are exposed to.
The injected crystals can last inside macrophages >1.5 years and promote apoptosis and necrosis of tissue. Add a stress environment dated outside the term limit of a safety study and then SUMOylation which can reactivate EBV and transactivate superinfected viral proteins. Put them together and you get a beautiful and complex immjne response that cannot decipher between the two viruses. The mixed components can be recognized as autoantigens (i.e., autoimmunity). In the case or organ transplantation, rejection of donor tissue- I just published that. Next question?
My question: On Paul Offit's site you told me - in effect - you resent being treated as if you are an "unintelligent anti-vaxxer." You obviously had a point to make, and a new paper to support it. Why not make your response accessible to the average reader, rather than assume the position of the arrogant asshole and be ignored?
It has been made accessible. It's open-access and I've posted it several places. When I see physician's arrogant snips, that are potentially deceiving to the public, I have been tending to respond to make them reconsider that the story is not over yet, including the link and to be more open-minded. Some have asked for more information. I don't typically consider my responses to be acting like an asshole except when someone starts calling me names to begin engaging and pointing out to the public that I am just a crank to be ignored until scientific "consensus" catches up with the reality of the data. If that's considered being an asshole, so be it. Some your own posting start out with similar pre-judging and rather debasing snippets. Neither of us see the whole picture, but without having the freedom to dialogue, simply because it has to follow certain protocols in people's minds, it is easy for the public to "rest easy" in a narrative that makes them secure. Insecurity can induce fear or anger, or be a motivation to search for more details. My goal is the latter. I'm sure I don't need to lecture you on that.
And in Paul's case, I spent week's preparing an hour presentation he invited me into his office for, then gave me 15 minutes, for which I took 20 seconds to consolidate everything and showed him 1 piece of data out of much more. He sent me off with an article and told me to come back when I had more data. The article he gave me was the solitary evidence for H1N1 vaccine implication to narcolepsy. But no evidence if molecular mimicry. After I was fired, I figured out the epitope from EBV and H1N1. It completely blocks the orexin receptor. His narcissism isn't evident to the public. He can be a really nice person. But he doesn't stray from his narrative. Brilliant in some ways, short-sighted and unwilling to change in others. If course, when your career rides on consistency, I get that. Except it was very publuc that he didn't have his son get the boosters because of the association with cardiomyopathy. No one ever heard an explanation for that. And then I found what no one else did... the only viral protein to have more of a certain type of modification site than EBV gp350 is SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. I wasn't allowed to publish that either. The publisher of my paper wouldn't even allow me to make the comparison in the figure I included. No conspiracy there, just comparison. But it reeks of something no one else ever pointed out. That didn't happen naturally.
Your arrogance will be your undoing.
Yeah
The digestive system actually ignores most dietary Al, rather than filtering it. It goes straight through.
The aluminum in an adjuvant does not all "end up" in the bloodstream at once. Because the Al salts used as adjuvants are poorly soluble, the Al is released slowly. Prompt excretion by the kidneys means that an Al adjuvant has negligible effect on circulating Al.
This article completely misunderstands and misrepresents toxicology. Even the conclusions from the cherry picked articles conflict with the article data. One cited article even showed that kids with higher hair aluminum have poorer motor development- yet this isn’t acknowledged in this article.
This kind of misrepresentation of science is precisely why people don’t trust the medical establishment anymore.
Which article? …The one that found hair aluminum levels were no higher in vaccinated children than in unvaccinated children?
As a double Board-certified toxicologist, I disagree. The article does not misunderstand or misrepresent toxicology. I look forward to your explanation of how it misunderstands or misrepresents toxicology. I could do with a good laugh.
I think your misrepresentation of what this article is saying is the real crime. I don't even think you read the whole thing to be quite honest.