It's a false equivalency to compare an amount of a substance eaten vs injected. Injected substances can get to places in the body and in different quantities than substances eaten.
There are different forms of aluminum, with different absorption rates, and different potential behaviors in the body.
Here's a study of aluminum accumulation in rodents after injection: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-...
I don't think there are any studies showing that aluminum doesn't accumulate or remain in the body long after injection - while I've found ~5 studies indicating that it does.
Doesn't mean it's dangerous, just that some amount of it does stick around long term and it is not clear to me that it's a drop in the bucket compared to the aluminum we eat. We also eat a lot more aluminum than people used to before the industrial revolution. The amounts of aluminum we eat now could be mildly harmful too - I don't know about that.
Below is the math on amount of aluminum that a normal baby ingests vs gets injected. I got a result that a baby's first year they get between 2x to 65x as much aluminum in their blood from injections vs from feeding.
A baby drinking breast milk (250L in the first year) would get 250 * 40µg = 10mg of aluminum in their first year from breast milk. A baby eats around 300000 calories in their first year, which leaves 120000 not from breast milk. At a rate of 8mg of aluminum per 2300 calories this would be another 416mg of aluminum from food for a total of 426mg.
The absorption rate into the bloodstream of that aluminum would vary between ~0.01% (for aluminum hydroxide) to ~0.3% (for aluminum citrate), so they would get 0.04mg to 1.3mg of aluminum in their blood across the first year from ingestion. Compared to 0.125mg to 0.85mg per dose of vaccine. They get around 10 doses of vaccines containing aluminum in the first year, for around ~2.6mg of aluminum total, but 100% of that is absorbed since it's injected. So the amount that gets into the blood during the first year from vaccination is somewhere from 2 to 65 times the amount a baby would get in their blood from eating/drinking.
I could be wrong on this logic or math somewhere, and welcome being corrected.
Another aspect of this is that the injected aluminum adjuvant comes in big (relative to ingestion) sudden doses with the intent to trigger a significant immune response to the antigen. That could affect the body differently than a gradual very small daily dose.
Again, not claiming that injecting aluminum is dangerous, but it seems to me babies could be getting far more persistent aluminum in their bodies from injections than from food, and as far as I know this has not undergone a long term study showing that it's safe. Almost all vaccine studies have aluminum injected in both arms of the study, and I haven't found a single aluminum vs placebo study - please share if you have one.
Infant kidneys may not be as efficient as adult kidneys, but any aluminum acquired through vaccines would still be excreted by the time they're able to talk.
Point being that for a given amount of aluminum, many orders of magnitude more of it is still in the body years later if it was injected as compared with ingested.
I'm not saying this is harmful necessarily, but it is not something I would simply dismiss.
Studies in humans show that if doesn't end up accumulating unless your kidneys aren't working.
showing aluminum accumulation in human brain: (not from vaccines it could be from other sources, point is just that it did accumulate in these brains) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28159219/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64734-6
I may be missing something and this only happens in people whose kidneys don't work but my quick glancing at these studies didn't suggest that.
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...
Goullé JP, Grangeot-Keros L. Aluminum and vaccines: Current state of knowledge. Med Mal Infect 2020 Feb;50:16-21.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0399077X1...
Although aluminum at high doses can cause a variety of clinical manifestations, the quantity of aluminum in vaccines is too small to cause a direct toxic effect. Indeed, the quantity of aluminum in biological specimens from those receiving aluminum-containing vaccines is indistinguishable from unvaccinated subjects. The concern that aluminum in vaccines might be associated with a rare autoimmune disease called macrophagic myofasciitis has been refuted by previous studies.
(Not trying to be flippant, more just curious) Want to link to those?
persistence in humans: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11522584/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22425036/ https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3...
persistence in animals: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27908630
showing aluminum accumulation in human brain: (not known to be from vaccines it could be from other sources, point is just that it did accumulate in these brains) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28159219/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64734-6
I don't know, I feel like we actually should generally dismiss the idea of things as harmful when there are no studies that demonstrate harm but there are studies showing a lack of harm. If the facts change, so should our assessment. But not before.
Really the debate about could something be harmful is missing the point, and likely intentional misdirection by certain actors. Many things could be proven to be harmful in the future. But bad actors aren't asking that we just keep our minds open to the possibility of that future discovery, they're demanding we make policy decisions now based on that potential outcome.
If we're going to ban vaccines with aluminum, it should be because we have scientific proof that it's bad or very likely to be bad, not just that the possibility exists that it could be bad and that badness might be demonstrated at some point in the future.
So if company X creates compound Y and they get some studies published showing that Y is safe, then everyone else should assume it's safe and no one should look further at it?
There have been many cases of drugs being created, with studies showing safety, then later shown to be dangerous after killing people - let alone causing mild or subtle harm, and banned.
I don't think we should ban aluminum now. I also think the question of possible harm from aluminum is not settled and we shouldn't ban discussion of it. And I hope that because aluminum is a neurotoxin and can persist in the body, that research continues to be done to hopefully one day find ways to make vaccines not need aluminum, similar to how vaccines have been moving away from using mercury as the adjuvant.
Meanwhile, the argument is made that the benefit of aluminum adjuvant outweighs any potential cost and that's fine. I also would like it if they did a placebo controlled study of vaccines with aluminum vs no vaccine.
I don't think the Danish study in this article should be retracted. I'd also appreciate if they revised it to address the flaws that have been pointed out.
If this is what you meant, there are already studies covering this.
If you instead meant to say a study comparing vaccines with aluminum to the same vaccine without, there are those studies as well.
/s
You might be wondering what kind of nonsense I am spouting off. I’m wondering the same thing about these anti-vax arguments.
Wrong. There are oral vaccines, like polio. However the taste of it is disgusting.
I mean, I guess the growth medium the virus actually lives in (OPV is an attenuated virus, so it's actually polio, which is why the industrialized North which eradicated polio no longer uses this, too risky) probably tastes nasty but you're not supposed to be drinking growth medium, just get a dab on a sugar cube or something.