So what’s the deal with aluminum in vaccines, anyway? Part II

As I was saying in Part I, it’s important to look at what happens to the aluminum adjuvant compound particles once they enter the body, in order to understand where and how they end up.

Again, I’m not making claims to be an expert in chemistry, human physiology or even math, so if any bona fide experts find errors of substance or calculation, please let me know.

Not all parenteral administration is the same

Sears conflates all methods of parenteral (i.e, not via the gut) administration of aluminum as being exactly the same, and thus compares the amount of aluminum given in intravenous solutions to that injected intramuscularly/subcutaneously in vaccines, and is astonished such a relatively large amount is allowed in vaccines. However, this comparison is not, in my opinion, a valid one.

It’s important to remember that aluminum compounds can only bind to carrier proteins and enter the blood, brain and other organs as individual molecules in a solution. That is the state in which they’re injected IV. However, vaccine adjuvants are purposely constructed to form large – 2-5 micron particles, which are not visible to the naked eye, but huge on a molecular scale – crystals/chunks of aluminum compound. It makes about as much sense to compare the two methods as it does to compare the IV administration of 20ml of a 50% glucose solution to implanting a 10gr piece of (glucose only) rock candy inside a muscle. Sure, you’ve inserted 10 grams of glucose into the body either way. But which method of administration do you think will have more profound an effect?

In order for the glucose in the rock candy to reach the bloodstream, it would need to be dissolved in the interstital fluid and be carried from there, via the lymphatic system, to the blood. The same thing needs to happen to the aluminum compound particles: the aluminum needs to dissolve into the interstitial fluid, apparently with the help of weak acids existant in this fluid, and this doesn’t happen all at once. It’s very much like a slow-release mechanism of a drug, if you will.

So what happens to the adjuvant after IM administration?

Unfortunately, there is only one study which looks at the distribution of aluminum derived from vaccine adjuvants injected IM – an animal study, no less! – and that is
Flarend et al (1997). The sutdy in full is not available for free online, but there is online what looks like a draft with the relevant text in .doc form, minus the tables and figures (which I’ll provide if relevant). While one may be inclined to dismiss a mere animal study, keep in mind that the animals involved (New Zealand white rabbits) weighed about as much as a small newborn human (2.5-2.8kg at the beginiing of the sutdy, 3.2-3.7kg at the end of it), and we’re still talking about fellow mammals here. So while the analogy to human infants is probably far from perfect and human studies should most certainly be done, it’s still somewhere in the ballpark and we can, I think legitimately draw a few conclusions from this study.

Flarend and colleagues used 6 rabbits for their experiment. Two of them were injected IM with 850 micrograms (mcg) of aluminum in the form of Al hydroxide vaccine adjuvant (the maximum amount of aluminum the FDA allows in a single vaccine, to remind you) and another two were given a similar IM dose of aluminum in Al phosphate form. The aluminum isotope used was the synthetic 26Al, so that the vaccine-derived aluminum’s path through and out of the body could be easily traced. The fifth rabbit was given 850mcg of aluminum citrate (as solution) IV, and the sixth – 850mcg of IM aluminum phosphate using regular 27Al (as a control for cross-contamination of the samples). They then repeatedly checked the rabbits’ blood and urine levels of 26Al, and at the end of the 28-day experiment, sacrificed the animals and examined how much 26Al had concentrated in various tissues of the body in the interval.

The researchers found that after 28 days, only 17% of the aluminum hydroxide adjuvant dose, on average, and only 51% of the aluminum phosphate had been absorbed from the muscle into the bloodstream (for some reason, people often quote these figures as being the amount eliminated from the body after 28 days, but a simple and careful reading of the text shows this to be erroneous). Of the total dose, 6% of the aluminum from the aluminum hydroxide adjuvant was excreted in the urine after those 28 days, as opposed to 22% from the aluminum phosphate. Though this demonstrates that aluminum phosphate is more soluble (about 3 times more soluble, in fact) in the interstitial fluid than aluminum hydroxide, the fact is that either adjuvant will take several months to completely clear from the body. Therefore, Dr. Sears’ method of spreading out the shots month by month, especially in the early months when many shots are given simultaneously, is unlikely to make that much of a difference regarding the elimination of aluminum.

The maximum increase in total aluminum blood levels in the rabbits was found to have been 2 nanograms (nanogram=1/1000th of a microgram, or 1 billionth of a gram) per mililiter, above a normal level (for rabbits) of 30ng/ml. The authors caclulate that when a similar adjuvant dose is given to an adult human, this will result in a rise of 0.04ng/ml over a baseline mormal value of 5ng/ml – which would be completely undetectable but for the extremely sensitive methods of detection used for the 26Al isotope. If we’re talking about a ~3kg baby (about the same weight as the rabbits), the 6% rise in blood aluminum values would translate into a rise of 0.3ng/ml (i.e, the babies would have 5.3ng/ml aluminum levels instead of 5.0). Not exactly something to write home about, especially when you consider that the same dose of aluminum in the rabbit given it intravenously, saw a whopping 2000% rise in its blood aluminum concentration (an increase of 600ng/ml). (Edited to add: Even if the rise is in absolute terms, i.e 2ng/ml per vaccine, no baby would reach anything resembling toxic blood levels even if several vaccines were administered simultaneously).

What’s even more interesting is the minute amounts of aluminum which ends up in the body’s solid tissues after those 28 days. Figure 3 of the paper (shown below, click on the thumbnail for full-sized graphic) demonstrates these amounts graphically:

As you can see, the amount of aluminum that accumulated in those 28 days was on the order of 0.1ng/gram wet weight of rabbit brain for the aluminum hydroxide, and about 0.3ng/gr wet weight for aluminum phosphate (the text clarifies that 2.9 times the amount of aluminum was deposited in the tissues in the rabbits who received aluminum phosphate adjuvant).

Given this data from this study, let’s do a little calculation that purposely exaggerates the amount of aluminum a baby will get, and see if we can raise the aluminum levels in his brain to toxic levels. I repeat, this calculation is both very exaggerated and very simplified, so please don’t quote me as saying “brain aluminum levels will rise by X% as a result of vaccines”. This is a maximum number – the real amount of aluminum from vaccines that ends up in the brain is most likely to be much lower (and should, in fact, be determined by research).

Until the age of 18 months, a baby can, at most, receive up to 17 aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines, according to the 2008 childhood vaccine schedule (Hep B X3, DTaP X4, Pneumococcal vaccine X4, Hib X4, and Hep A X2). Let’s assume that our hypothetical baby is getting all 17, separately (no combination vaccines), each of them containing the maximum 850mcg of aluminum. Let’s also assume half the vaccines have aluminum phosphate adjuvant and half Al hydroxide (some have both, actually), and that the rate of dissolution of the adjuvant and its entry into the blood happens at the same rate as seen in the rabbits for 18 months (not likely in real life; the rate of the dose entering the blood would likely taper off after a few months due to the decreasing dose of adjuvant in the body).

In which case, such a baby would accumulate 0.2ng(average between 0.1 and 0.3) x 17 vaccines X 18 months = 61.2ng/g wet weight of brain.

The average newborn’s brain weighs ~350gr; by 18 months it weights about 1.2kg (1200 grams). Let’s pretend, for ease of calculation, that the baby’s brain weighs 1kg (1000 grams) on average throughout. Hence, 61.2ng/g *1000 grams = 61.2mcg/kg (or 0.0612mcg/gram) will collect in the baby’s brain from those 17 vaccines.

For the next step, we’ll convert this figure to dry weight of brain (you’ll see why in a minute). As the human brain is ~75% water, if we were to squeeze all the water out of it, the concentration of aluminum in the brain would increase by a factor of 4. Hence, we’ll have an accumulation of 0.0612mcg/g X 4 aluminum = 0.2448mcg is added to each gram of brain tissue (dry weight) as a result of all 17 of those aluminum-loaded vaccines.

The Priest review (remember I told you to keep it open in another tab?) has, on page 12/29 of the .pdf file (under section 5.4, “aluminum in the brain”), in the right-hand column, various estimates of aluminum content of normal human brains by dry weight:

(The various measurements just wouldn’t C&P properly, hence the screenshot). As you can see, the amount of aluminum in neurologically normal human brains ranges from about 0.5-2+ micrograms per gram of dry weight of brain. Compare that to the extra ~0.25mcg per gram added by the vaccines (and to remind you, that is most likely an extreme exaggeration of the amount)…the amount falls well within the standard error of some of the measurements!

OK, that’s the math lesson for today . But I hope I’ve made clear that, unless rabbits and humans are as physiologically distant as rabbits and glow-worms, it’s extremely unlikely that huge amounts of aluminum are getting into, and poisoning, babies’ brains as a result of the aluminum in vaccines. Mind you, if you think anything less than perfect knowledge isn’t enough, consider the information we have about the safety of medicines during pregnancy and nursing, which doctors (and “natural” parents) use every day: most of what we know in that field is a result of animal experiments and empirical evidence of harm (or lack thereof), not detailed toxicological studies or randomized controlled trials.

So where do we go on from here?

As I said in Part I, even though all signs indicate the amount of aluminum in vaccines is entirely benign, the research in humans still needs to be done. It’s technically feasible, though probably extremely costly, to take a bunch of babies, give them the full course of vaccines specially made so their aluminum adjuvants contain 26Al, and subject them to either regular urine samples and needlesticks (essentially, what Pichichero did with thimerosal), or/and periodical total-body scans to see which organs picked up the labelled aluminum. I’m not sure I’d volunteer my baby for such a lengthly ordeal, especially since the babies would probably need to be sedated regularly (perhaps with chloral hydrate) for the scans.

Another option is to inject (intramuscularly!!) the labelled adjuvants into adult volunteers, who can consent to all the interventions and lie still for the scans without sedation. Yet another, though even more expensive, possibility would be to take 2 groups of infant monkeys and dose them according to the infant vaccine schedule – either with or without 26Al-labelled adjuvants (hopefully, avoiding the pitfalls other researchers have stumbled into). You could even try and teach them some tricks at the end of the experiment, and see if there are any cognitive differences between the two groups.

Either way, if people stop vaccinating because of scare campaigns like those against thimerosal and aluminum…the results will be far, far more costly.

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