The New York Times is wrong about vaccines containing aluminium being a “good thing”

A recent New York Times article claimed that aluminium in vaccines is “a good thing.” Aluminium toxicity experts told The Defender the chemical was never sufficiently safety tested by the industry, is toxic and continues to be used in vaccines because it’s more profitable than safer alternatives.

4 Things the New York Times Got Wrong About Aluminium in Vaccines

By Brenda Baletti as published by Children’s Health Defense on 27 January 2025

This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines.

A New York Times article published on 24 January online claimed that aluminium used in childhood vaccines is necessary, well-tested and safe.

Aluminium in vaccines is “a good thing” the headline said and “vaccine scientists” find it “strange” that people – like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – raise questions about it because there is no indication in aluminium’s nearly 100 years of use in vaccines that there are any problems.

President-elect of the American Academy of Paediatrics Dr. Andrew Racine – who is not a “vaccine scientist” – told the New York Times, “If there was something jumping out about a lack of safety, we would most likely have seen it someplace, and it just doesn’t appear.”

The article is one of several published recently by media outlets including the Daily Tribune, The Conversation and FactCheck.org, defending the use of aluminium in drugs designed for infants.

The Defender spoke with several top researchers on aluminium toxicity and aluminium adjuvants. They said aluminium adjuvants in vaccines are poorly understood by the pharmaceutical industry and have not been appropriately safety tested against a placebo.

They also said there is evidence that the toxic chemical can wreak havoc on the immune system.

The media’s claims ignore decades of research and extensive evidence that aluminium ought to be completely eliminated as a vaccine ingredient, they said.

Chris Exley, PhD, one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminium exposure, said the article “reads like a last-ditch effort by the Times on behalf of the vaccine industry to prevent the inevitable moratorium on the continued use of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines.”

Guillemette Crépeaux, PhD, associate professor in physiology and pharmacology at Alfort National Veterinary School, France, said, “All experts on aluminium and aluminium-based adjuvants agree: These compounds are not safe. The scientific literature is very clear on this matter.”

Many of the vaccine industry’s claims about aluminium are at stake in the historic Merck trial that began last week for fraud, negligence and concealing the likelihood and severity of adverse effects associated with its Gardasil HPV vaccine.

4 Things The Times Didn’t Tell Readers About Aluminium In Vaccines

1. Long-term use of aluminium adjuvants doesn’t mean they’re safe.

The Times repeated a claim made by vaccine makers and government regulatory agencies that the long-term use of aluminium adjuvants shows that they are safe.

However, Exley, author of ‘Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom: Discussions with Mr. Aluminum’, wrote on Substack that even though aluminium adjuvants have been used for a long time, vaccine manufacturers still haven’t shown any detailed understanding of how aluminium adjuvants work.

Instead, they perpetuate “a number of myths” about the mechanism of action, Exley wrote.

The New York Times explained how adjuvants work using terms like “scientists believe,” but conceded that how adjuvants enhance the activity of immune cells is “not fully understood.”

Researchers have also reported that the mechanisms of adjuvant toxicity are even less well understood than the mechanisms by which adjuvants enhance vaccine immunogenicity.

Exley explained that adjuvants are used because antigens – like vaccines and bacteria – used in vaccines are often not sufficient to cause an immune response that would later protect someone from the target illness. Adding aluminium to the antigen provides a cheap and easy way to provoke an immune response to a weakened form of a virus.

The adjuvant is added to provoke inflammation, Crépeaux explained. “By definition, the role of an adjuvant is to be toxic.”

Epidemiologist and internal medical specialist Dr. Rokuro Hama, who heads the Japan Institute of Pharmacovigilance, said the adjuvants work by damaging tissue to stimulate inflammation – one of the reasons adjuvants are linked to autoimmune disorders.

As the stimulated white blood cells, or macrophages, try to fight the toxic aluminium, “they do what they know: migrate throughout the body.” This means the aluminium can reach multiple organs and systems, Hama said.

Multiple studies have shown that aluminium is toxic at the injection site and beyond, Exley said. And several studies link aluminium adjuvants to autoimmune conditions.

The Times said that some limited evidence from a questionable study shows a link between aluminium and asthma, but there is no evidence for any other concerns.

Exley said the reference to asthma was “a red herring” used by pharmaceutical companies to create the perception that the industry is addressing the public’s concerns about toxicity and to distract from the extensive data on toxicity.

Exley said he has “spent 40 years at the bench studying aluminium and it is my unwavering opinion that aluminium adjuvants in vaccines are behind serious childhood illness including autism.”

2. Aluminium as an adjuvant has not been adequately safety tested. 

The New York Times said that each time a new vaccine using an aluminium adjuvant is developed, it undergoes “a lengthy clinical trial to evaluate its safety, and side effects are continuously monitored after approval.”

However, the experts said that no infant vaccine containing an aluminium adjuvant has been safety tested against a true placebo such as saline. Instead, the vaccines are tested against placebos that also contain an aluminium adjuvant or against other vaccines that contain one.

“This deception is the original ‘dirty trick’ used by vaccine manufacturers to mask the toxicity of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines,” Exley wrote.

In an expert report written for the ongoing lawsuit against Merck for adverse effects from its Gardasil vaccine, aluminium adjuvant expert Lucija Tomljenovic, PhD, wrote that statements like Racine’s claiming absence of evidence is evidence of absence is “a logical fallacy.”

Citing work by vaccine developer and immunology expert Dr. Nikolai Petrovsky, Tomljenovic said the absence is better explained by the fact that there are almost no high-quality randomised controlled trials or epidemiological studies investigating aluminium adjuvant safety.

This is especially striking, given that there are thousands of studies published on aluminium’s potency and efficacy as an adjuvant, the report noted.

Petrovsky also said that since aluminium was first introduced as an adjuvant in vaccines, “the regulatory bar has been raised significantly.” It is likely that if aluminium hadn’t been in use all these years and presented to regulatory bodies for approval today, “it would be refused registration on the basis of safety concerns.”

3. The quantity of aluminium in vaccines is neither small nor insignificant.

The New York Times article repeated a common claim that babies are exposed to only a small amount of aluminium through vaccines in the first six months of life, especially compared to aluminium from other sources.

The article stated that aluminium from vaccines totals 4.4 milligrams, which it compared to “one slice of American cheese,” which can contain up to 50 milligrams of aluminium.

Experts interviewed by The Defender found this claim particularly outrageous. “Comparing injected aluminium with oral aluminium is completely absurd,” Hama said. Crépeaux called the comparison “stupid.”

First, she said, the compounds are different. Adjuvants – substances not found in food – are especially toxic due to their particulate form. Next, the route by which aluminium enters the body matters. Intramuscular injection allows the body to absorb 100% of the injected aluminium and babies are exposed repeatedly every month or so through vaccines.

Lluís Luján, DVM, PhD, said that ingested or inhaled aluminium follows different metabolic routes and is mostly excreted. Injected aluminium remains in the tissue for months or years, which can lead to lifelong inflammatory reactions in animals and humans who are injected.

“It is a known neurotoxin,” he said, noting that in many species, aluminium causes an acute inflammatory response upon injection, followed by a chronic one.

As more aluminium-containing vaccines are injected into the same person, “the effects can be cumulative.”

Twenty-seven childhood vaccines approved in the US include an aluminium adjuvant, according to the New York Times. The amount of aluminium infants are exposed to in a single dose of a vaccine, let alone in all of those vaccines over many months, is not small.

Because safety studies are lacking and efficacy studies are abundant, the amount of aluminium adjuvant permitted in vaccines is selected based on efficacy, not safety, according to Tomljenovic and confirmed in publications by the US Food and Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) own scientists.

Additional research by Exley and colleagues has shown that the aluminium content of vaccines within batches varied significantly and “bears little or no resemblance” to the amount of aluminium listed on the drugs by the makers.

Regulators like the FDA and the European Medicines Agency admit that they don’t independently verify the aluminium content of vaccines.

4. Aluminium adjuvants make vaccines more profitable.

Experts say the corporate media and vaccine makers’ defence of aluminium adjuvants is tied to pharma’s bottom line.

“Aluminium adjuvants are dirt cheap,” Exley wrote on Substack. “They add absolutely nothing to the cost of a vaccine.” He said that producing more antigens – an alternative way to elicit an immune response – is far more expensive.

Luján said: “In my opinion, the dispute on aluminium is merely a dispute of economic interests. At the end of all of this, the key point is money: The cost of adding aluminium to a vaccine is almost nothing. From an industrial point of view, who in their right mind would disregard so many advantages? Any other new adjuvant would represent a huge investment and maybe the revenues would not compensate.”

“Yes, some vaccines contain aluminium. That’s a good thing … for the industry,” Luján said, adding what he said were the unspoken words in the New York Times headline.

Related stories in The Defender

About the Author

Brenda Baletti, PhD, is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing programme at Duke University. She holds a PhD in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.