RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines, part 4: Aluminum edition (or: Everything old is new again…again)

A long time ago in what seems now to have been a very different time but now appears in retrospect just to have been the early stages of the process that has led us to having a rabid antivax activist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (and thus in charge of all non-military federal medical, public health, and biomedical research programs), there came a time when I started saying that “aluminum is the new mercury.” I fully realize that those not steeped in the rhetoric of the antivax movement might look at that statement with a quizzical “WTF?”; so I will explain. First, however, let me show you how everything old is new again in this space, with an article that I saw over the weekend:

Secretary Kennedy brought back members of the “aluminum family” as an “aluminum working group“ which is being led by Lyn Redwood, according to a member of the group who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The group consists of Christopher Exley (UK) and Christopher Shaw (Canada), the founders of the aluminum toxicity field of research; Guillemette Crepeaux, an aluminum researcher in Paris, and Nikolai Petrovsky, an Australian vaccine developer and Founder of Vaxine, a biotechnology company. Another member is William “Reyn” Archer III, MD, a former Texas Health commissioner and a vaccine critic. 

The group has been meeting weekly and had four meetings so far, with no tangible decisions made yet, according to the source. On Tuesday, Kennedy and Jay Bhattacharya joined the meeting. Kennedy talked about accelerating aluminum research. Bhattacharya offered NIH funding via the R01 mechanism.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article is behind a paywall; so I’ll have to look elsewhere for more answers. Even so, there’s so much to unpack here, just from this brief teaser. Before I explain the significance of this focus on aluminum and who the key players are, let’s look at the R01 mechanism. Let’s just say that this is the real “gold standard”—as opposed to President Donald Trump’s “gold standard science—mechanism by which the National Institutes of Health has traditionally funded scientific studies. Basically, it’s a mechanism by which researchers can propose any project they want (although the NIH usually also has RFAs—requests for applications—specific to scientific areas of particular interest at the time), and, as long as the science passes muster and the NIH has sufficient funds, it will be funded. A typical R01 funds four or five years of research and usually provides around $1.5 to $2 million in total costs, direct and indirect), although it can, with sufficient budget justification, be significantly larger than that. Applications for R01s go through a rigorous peer review process by committees called study sections, which assign applications priority scores based on the science and the preliminary evidence used to back up the application. The scored applications then go to an NIH scientific council, which funds the top-scored grant applications until the money runs out. Unfortunately, in recent years, the NIH has only had a budget sufficient to fund around 10% of such grants, or even less, depending on the specific Institute in the NIH. (For a more detailed description of the process, complete with gory details, read my previous posts here and here.)

The point is that, unless Bhattacharya corrupts the study section process to grease the skids for funding grants looking at aluminum adjuvants in vaccines as a cause of autism, there’s no way any applications by the usual suspects will pass scientific muster; either that, or the Bhattacharya might have to fund grants that do actual legitimate science with respect to aluminum adjuvants.

Now, back to the players and the significance of this story. I will focus mainly on Christopher Shaw and Christopher Exley because I am most familiar with them for their long history of horrendously bad studies on aluminum adjuvants that have sought to link them to autism, as well as some other atrociously awful antivax “science.” I’ve been writing about Shaw since 2011 and Exley since 2017. Both have latched onto aluminum adjuvants used in several childhood vaccines as The One True Cause of autism of the supposedly vaccine-induced variety.

First of all, let’s discuss aluminum adjuvants in vaccines.

What is the deal with antivaxxers and aluminum adjuvants, anyway?

I started out this post by saying how I had at one time quipped that among antivaxxers “aluminum is the new mercury.” To understand what I meant, here’s a little history. Twenty to twenty-five years ago, there were two main factions of antivaxxers. Across the pond in the UK and Europe, the followers of Andrew Wakefield predominated; i.e., antivaxxers who believed that it was the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine that caused autism, based on Andrew Wakefield‘s 1998 fraudulent case series published in The Lancet linking MMR to “autistic enterocolitis.” Here in the US, the predominant group of antivaxxers were what some of us dismissively referred to as the “mercury militia.” They blamed mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was used in several childhood vaccines as The One True Cause of Autism. Indeed, RFK Jr. himself started out in the mercury militia camp, and his 2005 conspiracy-fest of an article, Deadly Immunity, wove a conspiracy theory tale of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working furiously to cover up a link at a conference held in 2000, something I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, named after the conference center where the meeting was held.

Percolating around underneath the two main “theories” of how vaccines supposedly cause autism were other ideas, such as the “toxins” gambit that would point to different scary-sounding ingredients present at very low levels in vaccines—e.g., formaldehyde—and blame them for autism and, of course, the idea that aluminum adjuvants in some vaccines cause autism. After the CDC recommended the removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 1999, a process completed by around 2001-2002, after which autism prevalence continued its rise unabated, evidence was accumulating that mercury in vaccines wasn’t causing autism to the point that even antivaxxers in the mercury militia contingent were having trouble arguing that it wasn’t a failed hypothesis. Even RFK Jr. eventually gave up and renamed his antivax org from World Mercury Project to Children’s Health Defense and pivoted to a more general antivax stance that was less laser-focused on mercury in vaccines, albeit in 2018, nearly 17 years after thimerosal had been removed from childhood vaccines.

Into the breach stepped the “aluminum family,” although I can’t help but think of the use of the word “family” more in the Godfather vein, to take the place of the mercury militia, because, I guess, one metal is just as good as another as the cause of autism. By way of more background, it was discovered in 1926 by Alexander T. Glenny and colleagues, who reported that precipitation of antigen onto insoluble particles of aluminium potassium sulphate, known as “potash alum,” before immunization produced better antibody responses than soluble antigen alone. Today, aluminum adjuvants are used in routine recommended vaccines such as hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-containing vaccines, Haemophilus influenzaetype b, HPV, meningococcal B and ABCWY and pneumococcal vaccines, as well as in combination vaccines that contain these vaccines. It should be noted that aluminum is not used in live, weakened viral vaccines, like those against measles, mumps, rubella (MMR), varicella, and rotavirus. It is also important to note that this is not aluminum metal (antivaxxers often conflate the two), but aluminum salts. The main advantage of using aluminum adjuvants is that they make it possible to get the same immune response in a patient using less antigen or, as I like to call it, more bang for the buck.

Big names in the “aluminum family” include two of the scientists above who have been pumping out bad studies linking aluminum adjuvants in vaccines to autism going on 20 years, Christopher Shaw and Christopher Exley, whom we will discuss shortly. First, however, I like to point out that there is no good evidence that aluminum adjuvants cause (or even detectably increase the risk of) autism or autism spectrum disorders, while there is plenty of evidence that they do not, most recently a Danish study that RFK Jr. tried to get retracted this summer.

The study by Niklas Worm Andersson et al, entitled Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood: A Nationwide Cohort Study, was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in July. I won’t go into a lot of detail but will briefly describe the study, which involved 1,224,176 children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018 who were alive and residing in the country at age 2 years. The researchers examined 50 adverse events, including 36 autoimmune, 9 atopic or allergic, and 5 neurodevelopmental disorders, with definitions adapted from previous work and:

To evaluate the potential association between cumulative aluminum exposure from vaccinations by age 2 years and the study outcomes, we used Cox proportional hazards regression. Time since age 2 years was used as the underlying time scale to estimate adjusted hazard ratios per 1-mg increase in aluminum exposure, along with 95% CIs. These hazard ratios represent how much the hazard changed when a child received 1 additional milligram of aluminum in their vaccines by age 2 years compared with a child who received 1 mg less. Each outcome model was adjusted for a priori–defined potential confounders, including birth year and season, sex, maternal age at delivery, maternal place of birth, maternal smoking during pregnancy, parity, preterm birth, birthweight, number of visits to a general practitioner before age 2 years, maternal prescription drug use during pregnancy, selected maternal conditions within 5 years before the child’s birth date, and parental household income (Supplement Table 1). 

In essence, Andersson et al correlated the total exposure to aluminum adjuvants from vaccines with the risk of these outcomes, controlling for appropriate confounders. Rather than describe in depth what they found, here’s the money chart:

As you can see, this is about as negative as study as one can possibly imagine. No wonder RFK Jr. was so displeased as to do something that is incredibly rare from an HHS Secretary and call for the study’s retraction. On what basis? As RFK Jr. always does, he tries to claim that the investigators had intentionally excluded children at the highest risk for bad outcomes from aluminum adjuvant exposure, labeled the investigators “pharma shills,” and used his usual rhetorical tactics to imply that the investigators had intentionally looked for a negative result. Of course, it troubles him not at all that he seems to think that such studies should be designed so as to look for a positive result, which is not how science is done. Given that I missed writing about this whole kerfuffle when it happened, I’m not feeling disposed to do a detailed deconstruction here myself, especially given that the purpose of the post is to introduce you to more antivax scientists being foisted upon the CDC’s ACIP The best deconstruction of RFK Jr.’s dishonest “deconstruction” of this Danish study is this one, given that it’s a paragraph-by-paragraph dismantling of RFK Jr.’s original post “dismantling” the study on TrialSiteNews. (Dr. Jess Steier also wrote an excellent demolition of RFK Jr.’s lies as well.)

Even though I don’t want to list and explain every RFK Jr. “criticism,” I do think that mentioning one or two of them will give you a flavor of how dishonest and scientifically invalid his criticisms are. For example, RFK Jr. asserts:

The researchers deliberately excluded children who died before age 2, those with early illnesses, and those with implausibly high levels of aluminum exposures (2.8% of children) to hide vaccine injuries.

One answer:

Andersson et al note that the exclusion of children “who received an implausible number of vaccines” (not “the highest exposure levels”). There’s no evidence that these exclusions systematically biased the results. Importantly, the highest valid aluminum exposure category (up to 4.5 mg) was included in the analysis.

Part of Dr. Steier’s answer:

The researchers were specifically interested in new diagnoses of outcomes after 2 years of age, so they could avoid any shorter-term health differences in children under the age of 2. Children who already had one of the outcomes of interest or died before age 2, by definition, cannot receive a new diagnosis of the outcome after age 2. Starting follow-up at age 2 ensured the total level of exposure to aluminum by age 2 was set and allowed for the expected delay between symptom onset and diagnosis of these outcomes. In a secondary analysis, the authors assessed follow-up starting at 14 months and found similar results.

Also:

In the study’s comment section on the Annals of Internal Medicine website, Niklas Worm Andersson, MD, PhD, the study’s lead author from the department of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, and colleagues responded to similar concerns from readers, writing that key outcome measures like autism and asthma “cannot be reliably diagnosed in infancy,” which is why they excluded children aged younger than 2 years in the main analysis.

And also:

Kennedy’s article also refers to a secondary analysis in the supplementary data, which he claims “contradicts the study’s conclusions”. The analysis showed there was no overall risk of developing neurodevelopmental disorders with increasing aluminium exposure, but Kennedy pointed out there was a 67% increased risk of Asperger syndrome for every 1 mg increase in aluminium for children born after 2007. 

The authors said that analysis should be interpreted cautiously. They didn’t include it in their main findings because the underlying data were incomplete.

You get the idea, particularly that last part, where RFK Jr. implied that the authors were “forced” to include the data in a Supplement because of outcry at the results. Read both deconstructions if you’re interested in getting into the weeds of why RFK Jr.’s attack on the study and its investigators is so intellectually dishonest. It’s no wonder that Annals of Internal Medicine‘s editor declined to retract the study, with the editor adding that “retraction is warranted only when serious errors invalidate findings or there is documented scientific misconduct, neither of which occurred here.”

Again, I could go on and on and list the intellectually dishonest claims made by RFK Jr. about this study, but why bother when there are at least two excellent rebuttals already out there?

Let’s move on to the antivax cranks who have apparently been appointed to an ACIP working group on aluminum.

The two Christophers: Antivax aluminum blasts from the past

Enter Christopher Shaw and Christopher Exley. Christopher Shaw is a a Canadian neuroscientist and ophthalmologist and part of the faculty at the University of British Columbia, something that always made me wonder how the heck he started doing antivax “research.” I first encountered his “research” when I wrote about an antivax movie (The Greater Good) in 2011. In the film Shaw was interviewed and was shown saying that we’re all living in a “toxic” soup and that vaccines are part of that soup, all overlaid with a cartoon, a couple of images from which I’ve captured as screen shots:

Going back over posts that I’ve written involving Christopher Shaw over the years, I have to admit that one incident in particular stands out. If you have any doubt that Shaw is antivax to the core, let’s consider how he glommed onto the death of a young woman in 2012 in order to cynically exploit it. I’m referring to an 18-year-old woman named Jasmine Renata, who had tragically died in 2009 of unclear causes, although to me what had happened sounded consistent with the sort of idiopathic heart conditions that sometimes (and, fortunately, very uncommonly) cut short the lives of young people in their teens and early 20s. As I pointed out at the time, Jasmine Renata might never have been known outside of her grieving family and friends, except for one thing. Her mother was convinced that she knew the reason why Jasmine had died. In brief, she came to an explanation for her daughter’s death that was simple, emotionally resonant, and almost certainly wrong, and that explanation was that Gardasil was the cause of her daughter’s untimely death. This led her to contact, among other antivaxxers, Christopher Shaw to help her find evidence that Gardasil had caused her daughter’s death.

Shaw tried to deliver, too. Apparently, Dr. Shaw examined some of Jasmine’s brain tissue. Dr. Shaw behaved as expected and at the inquest claimed that he’d found both HPV DNA and aluminum in Jasmine’s brain, as well as other unspecified abnormalities. At the time, I could not find a good explanation published about how Dr. Shaw had supposedly found such things, further noting that, given Shaw’s abysmal track record, I’d want to know his methodology, in particular his negative controls for HPV, before I’d believe him. After all, as I’ve explained before, the amount of HPV DNA in Gardasil is minuscule; so it defies plausibility that the vaccine could be the source of so much HPV, if it really were there. Remember, in order to detect HPV DNA in the vaccines themselves, it took a super-sensitive PCR test (perhaps so sensitive as not to be specific). In other words, the amount of HPV DNA in Gardasil in the vaccine itself is minuscule, barely detectable only with an extremely sensitive assay. Now introduce it subcutaneously into someone’s body, thus diluting it enormously, and then wait six months?

It’s also utterly implausible to assume that the presence of HPV, if what Dr. Shaw was reporting, is not a completely spurious result (which it probably was, given his track record), means that it could only have come from the vaccine. Even if Shaw’s findings had been valid and reproducible by other scientists, he offered no explanation for how the mere detectable presence of aluminum and HPV DNA in the brain could lead to Jasmine Renata’s sudden and unexpected death. Let’s just put it this way. Shaw was into coming up with bogus “mechanisms” to explain young people supposedly “dying suddenly” before the “died suddenly” conspiracy theory became a thing during COVID-19. It doesn’t get more ghoulishly despicable than to take advantage of a grieving mother to feed her bad science to fuel her mistaken belief that Gardasil (or any other vaccine) had killed her daughter. I know, I know. Shaw would likely retort that his science was not bad and that his motives were pure, but that doesn’t change anything.

According to Shaw, it wasn’t just sudden death that vaccines could cause, thanks to the aluminum and other nasty stuff (according to him) that were in vaccines. In fairness (if one can be “fair” to him), the case of Jasmine Renata was an uncommon instance of Shaw lending his “expertise” to a human case. What Shaw has been known for over the years has primarily been his penchant for torturing mice in badly designed animal studies to “prove” that vaccines cause autism, starting in 2007, when he published such a “study” purporting to show that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause neurological damage in mice, although at the time he was looking for a link to Gulf War illness. (Unfortunately, my university does not offer access to the journal; so I can only look at the abstract.)

His most famous study of this sort was published in 2017, when he teamed up with another antivax “scientist” named Lucija Tomljenovic to publish a study that claimed to link vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants to autism. If you want to know the gory details why this study was so bad, go back and read my post Torturing mice, data, and figures in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience, as well as posts by The Mad Virologist, Skeptical Raptor, the Blood-Brain Barrier Scientist, as well as the PubPeer comments about the study. In brief, the paper claimed that aluminum adjuvants led to increased expression of genes associated with neuroinflammation and markers of autism. Unfortunately, it had many problems, including:

• They selected genes based on old literature and ignored newer publications.
• The method for PCR quantification was imprecise and was known not to be useful as an absolute quantification of expression of the selected genes.
• They used inappropriate statistical tests that were more prone to giving significant results which was probably why they were selected.
• Their dosing regime for the mice made assumptions about the mouse development that were not correct.
• They gave the mice far more aluminum adjuvant sooner than the vaccine schedule exposes children to.
• There were irregularities in both the semi-quantitative RT-PCR and Western blot data that strongly suggested that the images had been fabricated. To me (and everyone writing about it), this was the most damning thing about the paper, because it strongly suggested scientific fraud.

Ultimately, this paper was retracted, and deservedly so. So was another study by Shaw that concluded that the HPV vaccine, specifically Gardasil, could cause behavioral abnormalities in mice. I discussed this particular study in my usual nauseating detail over at my not-so-secret other blog. Suffice to say that two of the glaring problems with the study were a lack of blinding of observers doing the behavioral tests to the experimental group of each mouse and statistically illiterate use of the wrong statistical test so that a positive result was more likely to be found.

Finally, besides being willing to be ghoulish in the effort to help mothers “prove” that vaccines killed their children, Shaw is vindictive. In 2020, Shaw weaponized a vindictive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request against an Alzheimer’s disease scientist and expert named Catherine Roe. Why? Shaw was one of the panelists at an antivax confab called One Conversation, which had been organized by antivaccine activists Shannon Kroner and Britney Valas in 2018. I note that Kroner had initially contacted me to ask me if I would appear on the panel as part of the “other side” (the provaccine, pro-science side). Regular readers know my longstanding policy that I do not appear on the same stage as antivaccine cranks for a “debate” because, no matter what happens, it elevates the crank and there’s the risk that the cranks will be so good at Gish galloping that it might even be counterproductive. Even considering that, I recognized a trap when I saw one, particularly when Kroner was suspiciously cagey when I asked who the other panelists were going to be and would not tell me. A little later, I learned that, at least at that time, Kroner had confirmed the involvement of antivaccine activists Del Bigtree and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as antivaccine quack Dr. Toni Bark at One Conversation. A bit later, I then learned that Dr. Christopher Shaw had been invited. As you might imagine, I politely declined.

Now here’s the personal connection. When I had evidence regarding the true nature of One Conversation, I started emailing the real scientists whom they had invited to warn them that this was going to be a “conversation” highly biased towards antivax pseudoscience. This led Dr. Roe to withdraw from the event. What I ultimately figured out is that an antivaxxer had gotten my email exchange with Dr. Roe through an abusive FOIA request and then passed it on. I published Dr. Shaw’s email to Dr. Roe threatening to publicize her withdrawal, and I even published, with Dr. Roe’s permission, the email that I had sent to her warning about the true nature of One Conversation. (All is explained in great detail here.) I also reassured Dr. Roe that Shaw was clearly trying to harass me (and Dorit Reiss) but didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to contact me directly. I did learn one thing from that incident: Never use my university email address, given that I live in a state where state university email is subject to FOIA. Also, never use anyone else’s university email address if they work for a state university and live in a state subject in which their email might be subject to FOIA. This is why I have moved all activity related to my blog, any contact with journalists, or anything that might be weaponized by antivaxxers to a Proton Mail account.

In summary, Christopher Shaw is a committed antivaxxer who has a history of dodgy research, a willingness to contribute to a mother’s pain by employing his bad science in the service of “proving” that vaccines killed her daughter (although I realize that he wouldn’t see it that way), and is willing to threaten a scientist for having wisely pulled out of an antivax conference. But what about Christopher Exley?

Christopher Exley first came to my attention in 2017, when I sarcastically addressed Shaw, “Move over, Christopher Shaw, there’s a new antivaccine scientist in town.” Oddly enough, I had no idea at the time that Exley had been producing antivax studies for quite a long time before that. Exley, for his part, is a British chemist and was a Professor of Bioinorganic Chemistry at Keele University until 2021, when (he claims) he was pressured to resign. In reality, looking back it appears to me more likely that Keele University got fed up with his “research” and antivax activities and solicitation of crowdfunded donations to support his antivax research using the university donations portal. to the tune of over £150,000. This, of course, makes Exley a “martyr” supposedly “silenced” by the scientific establishment, which antivaxxers love. As a bonus crank point, Exley has also blamed aluminum for Alzheimer’s disease.

For an example of the “quality” of the sorts of studies Exley has published on vaccines, aluminum, and autism, I’ll just start out with the very first ever study by Exley that I ever examined. Interestingly enough, it had nothing to do with autism or vaccines, but rather tried to demonstrate that aluminum-containing antiperspirants were a cause of breast cancer. In the study, originally published in 2007, Exley et al measured aluminum content in mastectomy specimens taken from 17 women with breast cancer. Four biopsies were taken, one from each quadrant, and he aluminum content was measured. Suffice to say, there were huge variations between the concentration of aluminum in the fat and the breast tissue between individuals, so much so that, looking at the evidence, I couldn’t see a clear difference. The authors claimed that they’d found a “statistically higher concentration of aluminium in the outer as compared with the inner region of the breast” even though their statistics showed that there was not. Meanwhile, a followup study by the same group from 2013 found “no statistically significant regionally specific differences in the content of aluminium” and found that the concentrations of aluminum in patients with breast cancer were “comparable with those reported in non-diseased human tissues from other areas of the body.”

In a review article published that same year Exley, try as he might, just couldn’t seem to develop a compelling case for the involvement of aluminum from antiperspirants (or anywhere else, for that matter) in increasing breast cancer risk. In another recent review article, Pineau et al emphasized in vitro results but downplay the negative epidemiological and pathological evidence. Yes, aluminum might increase proliferation in MCF10A cells, which, contrary to what is claimed are not exactly “normal” (I’m well familiar with this cell line) and MCF-7 breast cancer cells, but there’s no compelling evidence that this has any relevance to the real world, given that there is no compelling evidence from epidemiology, pathology, and toxicology studies linking aluminum-containing antiperspirants with breast cancer. Moreover, there was good evidence that there is no correlation between the use of antiperspirants and breast cancer, and a comprehensive literature review at the timefailed to find convincing evidence of a link, concluding, “After analysis of the available literature on the subject, no scientific evidence to support the hypothesis was identified and no validated hypothesis appears likely to open the way to interesting avenues of research.”

That’s basically the story of Exley’s research supposedly linking aluminum adjuvants to autism as well, such as the 2017 paper that first brought him to my attention, in which he used tissue samples from the Oxford Brain Bank, which stores brain tissue for research. You can read my complete deconstruction here, but the CliffsNotes version follows. Right off the bat, I could see a number of problems with the methods used. First, there were no controls. Certainly, if Exley were accessing the Oxford Brain Bank to obtain tissue from autistic people, as the study says in the Methods section, then why couldn’t he have also obtained brain tissue from age-matched normal controls? If the bank didn’t have such tissue, then that should have been stated as a justification for not including such samples. Either way, the relevance of these measurements were suspect, given that there was nothing to compare them to.

There was also an extreme paucity of clinical information about the samples used. There were no dietary histories, no medical histories, and all with a very small sample size. While dietary history might be hard to come by in a typical database associated with a tissue bank, there’s no excuse for not including medical histories, given that the Oxford Brain Bank definitely includes clinical information about the patient from which each sample came from. I also noted problems with the measurements of aluminum per dry weight of tissue, the controls used for the immunofluorescence experiments, and a number of other methodological problems. If you’re a scientist who knows something about fluorescence microscopy, the Blood-Brain Barrier Scientist wrote an even more technical deconstruction of the problems with the study, in particular the overinterpretation of the images to show what Exley wants them to show. Basically, one could say that Exley fired up his fluorescence microscope to look at the brains of autistic people and produce pretty pictures designed to terrify, by claiming that the aluminum from vaccines was depositing in the brain and causing autism.

Unsurprisingly, Exley has also appeared in at least one antivaccine propaganda film disguised as a documentary, Family Shots.

Here’s the final wrinkle. Exley is one of a group of scientists funded by the Child Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI), which is a group funded by Claire and Al Dwoskin, who are as rabidly antivaccine as anyone I’ve seen, including even Mike Adams. Among the group of antivaccine “scientists” funded by CMSRI are Anthony Mawson, Christopher Shaw (yep, the other Christopher in this post!), Lucija Tomljenovic (Christopher Shaw’s longtime partner in crimes against science), and Yehuda Shoenfeld, antivaccine crank “scientists” all. Come to think of it, if RFK Jr. is going to have an antivax “working group” on aluminum adjuvants manufacturing evidence to “prove” that aluminum adjuvants are dangerous and cause autism, I’m really surprised that he didn’t include Yehuda Shoefeld, the originator of the fake antivax diagnosis known as ASIA, Autoimmunity/Autoinflammation Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants, a vaguely defined catch-all diagnosis that encompasses vague symptomatology and unproven links to certain autoantibodies, all caused by adjuvants in vaccines, especially aluminum, a syndrome for which no compelling evidence exists. He’s also known for having provided pseudoscientific reports to bolster antivaccine claims that vaccines cause autoimmune disease and falsely claiming that Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure.

In any event:

Starting in 2011, research papers from “the aluminum family” are shown to be sponsored by Dwoskin and Fisher. Kennedy personally offered financial support to Exley, as Exley describes in his recent book (Exley’s institution declined Kennedy’s sponsorship). Another member of the group now works for Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense, and another was a guest on its podcast.

In other words, Shaw and Exley are deeply embedded in the antivaccine movement. In both cases, their scientific careers at some point pivoted from doing decent science to going down the rabbit hole of antivax conspiracy theories, which led them to use their scientific credentials to sciencewash bad science that they crank out in support of the failed hypothesis that vaccines cause autism.

RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines

Since this post is getting long, I won’t discuss the others who are apparently now members of the aluminum working group for ACIP, except to mention that Guillemette Crépeaux appears to be totally down with the unproven concept of ASIA and has defended and supported Shaw. He’s even co-authored a commentary with Exley arguing that ASIA is real and should be further investigated.

I will conclude, as I do in all these posts, by simply stating yet again that RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines—all vaccines. Anyone denying it is whispering past the graveyard…of vaccines. You don’t appoint antivaxxers like Christopher Shaw and Christopher Exley to a working group under the leadership of longtime antivax activist Lyn Redwood if you aren’t looking to manufacture “scientific evidence” to justify eliminating access to vaccines that include aluminum adjuvants. Add them to the rogues’ gallery of antivax sycophants, toadies, and lackeys from both the distant and recent antivax past that RFK Jr. has appointed to ACIP and to powerful positions in HHS, and the conclusion that it won’t be long before access to a number of vaccines will disappear, either as a result of regulatory actions or as a de facto result of changes in policy and regulation.