OPINION:
During an Oval Office event last month at which President Trump argued for changing the way children are vaccinated against a host of idled diseases, he raised eyebrows with warnings about two additives injected into infants and toddlers.
“We want no mercury in the vaccine. We want no aluminum in the vaccine,” he said. “You know what mercury is. You know what aluminum is. Who the hell wants that pumped into a body?”
Mercury was commonly found in childhood vaccines to trigger the human immune response until public outrage fueled a near-total ban in 2003.
Before that, aluminum served the same purpose, and it’s still being used. When aluminum is a bad biochemical match for a vaccine, scientists use emulsions of oil and water instead. Squalene, common in shark liver oil, is the most common alternative.
None of this is common knowledge. Americans see aluminum as the benign foil that covers our casseroles or the lightweight cans we drop into recycling bins.
Whether and how much this has harmed America’s children are open questions. This isn’t a problem only for the pre-K set: Aluminum in vaccines, foods and beverages may contribute to senile dementia.
When medical examiners look at slices of brain tissue from deceased Alzheimer’s disease patients, they consistently find aluminum deposits in the regions of the organ where the disease wastes. Do these aluminum blobs cause Alzheimer’s, or are they a consequence? Scientists have fought over that chicken-or-egg question for 80 years, but they routinely study “aluminum-induced Alzheimer’s disease” in mice and rabbits. Countless published studies use that exact phrase. Scientists acknowledge that a diet rich in aluminum is the best way to trigger dementia in small mammals.
As expected, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is all in on the vaccine angle. This summer, he demanded the retraction of a Danish study that reported no link between aluminum-containing vaccines and 50 different health risks among children.
Mr. Kennedy correctly pointed out that the study’s authors didn’t compare their results with those of a control group of unvaccinated children and that they tossed out data from more than 34,500 youngsters whose blood samples contained the highest levels of aluminum. The Danes said those measurements were implausible because they had never seen them in children on Denmark’s regular vaccination schedule. Yet such numbers, Mr. Kennedy says, are “routine for American children.”
It’s remarkable that we haven’t seen protesters giving Big Pharma companies a black eye over aluminum, especially considering the curated outrage that mercury generated a few decades ago. Amid a nationwide panic over naturally occurring traces of mercury in tuna, green-minded moms and their babies formed a stroller brigade and marched on the U.S. Capitol to complain about quicksilver in tuna sandwiches.
Even so, Mr. Trump, the unlikely public health mogul, appears to have learned that aluminum is a human neurotoxin. At the same time, Mr. Trump, the trade guru, is trying to boost our domestic aluminum industry. His tariffs on aluminum imports are now at 50%. The president wants foreign companies to open refineries and smelters in the U.S. despite the environmental impacts.
Aluminum production already gobbles up 5% of all electricity generated in the United States. That’s enough to light every home and office nationwide. We are already far short of what we need to fuel multiacre artificial intelligence data centers that already outnumber our shopping malls.
Whether or not Messrs. Trump and Kennedy are right about a health risk from aluminum in vaccines, the point should be moot because there are harmless alternatives. Mr. Kennedy might want the public health apparatus to explore alternatives to aluminum in other arenas too, even if it’s just a nod to the precautionary principle. Look at vaccines, but also soda and beer cans.
It turns out citric acid (and other acids), common in soda and beer, can leach aluminum directly into food and beverages. Manufacturers prevent the metal from shedding nanoparticles into your soft drink by quietly lining every can with a plastic barrier. (Visit KickTheCan.org to see a photo.)
COVID-19 triggered an enormous amount of attention on vaccine safety. Expect aluminum health awareness to spill over into an issue for the warning label police, and expect Americans to ask themselves why they had to learn about neurotoxic aluminum from Mr. Trump.
• Rick Berman is president of RBB Strategies.
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