Calls Grow for Journal to Retract Danish Study After Corrected Data Show Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism

But the damage is already done. Millions of people were told the study proved there’s no link.

This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.

The authors of a recent study of 1.2 million children claimed they found no link between the aluminum in vaccines and autism. However, corrected data now added to the study show the opposite is true, according to scientists with Children’s Health Defense. The authors did not respond to requests by The Defender to explain why they haven’t revised their conclusions based on the release of the corrected data.

The authors of a recent Danish study widely reported on by mainstream media claimed they found no link between the aluminum in vaccines and autism.

However, corrected data added after the study’s original July 15 publication date show the authors got it wrong — in fact, the data in the study of 1.2 million children clearly indicate a link between aluminum in vaccines and autism, according to scientists with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) who reviewed the study and the corrected data.

On July 17, the Annals of Internal Medicine, which published the Danish study, added a disclaimer stating that it “included an incorrect version of the Supplementary Material at the time of initial publication.”

The updated materials are available with the link to the study at “Correction: Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood.”

CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski broke the news of the buried autism link on Monday’s episode of “Good Morning, CHD.” Today, Jablonowski told The Defender:

“According to the corrected data, nearly 10 (9.7) of every 10,000 children who were vaccinated with a higher dose of aluminum (compared to a moderate dose) developed a neurodevelopmental disorder — mostly autism — between ages 2 and 5.”

On Monday, The Defender reached out to lead author Anders Hviid, a professor and department head of epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut, for comment on the allegation that the corrected data show a link between increased aluminum exposure and autism. In response, we received an automated email from Hviid stating that he was “out-of-office for the summer,” until Aug. 11.

The study’s corresponding author, Niklas Worm Andersson, M.D, Ph.D., an epidemiology researcher at the Statens Serum Institut, did not respond to a request for comment.

On July 14 — a day before the study was published and three days before the journal issued a correction — Hviid told numerous media outlets that the study showed aluminum in vaccines does not cause autism.

As of press time today, the authors of the study had not revised their findings to concur with the corrected materials that contradict the findings they shared with media outlets.

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NBC News, which reported on the uncorrected version of the study on July 14, criticized U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for saying during a 2024 “Joe Rogan Experience” interview that the aluminum in vaccines is “extremely neurotoxic.”

Last month, Kennedy appointed new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee. Last month, during the first meeting of the new members, they voted to remove thimerosal, a preservative that contains mercury, from vaccines. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it formalized the recommendation.

Reuters reported that Kennedy also considered asking the committee to examine vaccines that contain aluminum, but to date, the CDC has not announced any new recommendations related to aluminum.

Danish researchers ‘completely obfuscated what they really found’

According to the authors of the Danish study:

“This nationwide cohort study did not find evidence supporting an increased risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders associated with early childhood exposure to aluminum-adsorbed vaccines.”

However, after reviewing the corrected data, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, told The Defender the authors “completely obfuscated what they really found — a statistically significant relationship between aluminum exposure and autism.”

The buried link appears on Figure 11 (page 19) of the corrected supplemental materials.

The original version showed that children who received a large dose of aluminum were not at greater risk of getting a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, including autism, than kids who received a small or moderate dose.

Yet the corrected version showed that kids who received a large dose had a statistically significantly higher risk of being diagnosed with autism or other “pervasive” developmental disorders compared to those who received a moderate dose of aluminum.

Jablonowski said he and Hooker determined that the results were statistically significant — meaning they couldn’t be attributed to chance — by looking at the confidence intervals for each statistic.

A confidence interval “shows the range of values you expect the true estimate to fall between if you redo the study many times.”

The corrected figure also showed that children who received a large dose of aluminum had a statistically significantly higher risk of Asperger’s syndrome compared to kids who received a small dose of aluminum. However, kids in the large-dose group weren’t at a higher risk of any other neurodevelopmental issues compared to kids who received a small dose.

The low-dose group included roughly only 42,000 children. That could make it difficult to detect a statistical signal, Jablonowski explained.

“It’s not surprising that we see a strong signal among the groups that had more participants but not among the group that had fewer participants,” he said.

The moderate-dose group consisted of about 700,000 children, while there were about 460,000 children in the large-dose group.

How did authors make autism link disappear from original figure?

The original version of the study reported 2,961 fewer diagnoses of neurodevelopmental outcomes than the corrected version.

It appears the study authors “deleted the sicker kids,” Jablonowski said. “Or at least, just their diagnoses.”

The study also included allergy and autoimmune diagnoses, but none of those statistics were missing. Only the number of neurodevelopmental diagnoses differed between the original results and the corrected ones.

That suggests the authors didn’t make a random mistake, but intentionally fudged the number, Jablonowski said.

In hope of shedding light on what happened to the missing data, Jablonowski emailed the journal’s editors on July 18, asking them to publicize the comments between themselves and the anonymous scientists who peer-reviewed the study.

The inconsistencies in the study are specifically in “the figures in the main manuscript and the figures in the supplemental material,” Jablonowski wrote to the journal. “I believe the nature of those inconsistencies may be understood by examining the reviewer comments and subsequent exchanges.”

The journal editors have not responded.

‘Glaring signs’ Danish authors ‘didn’t practice good science’

The authors have not released the study’s raw data, citing Danish privacy law.

This frustrates independent scientists like Jablonowski, who said having access only to the data that the authors statistically adjusted makes it difficult to accurately critique the study, and impossible to replicate it.

Andersson did not respond when The Defender asked if the authors could share a de-identified version of the data that wouldn’t violate privacy law.

Jablonowski said:

“So if the raw data can’t be shared and Andersson is not going to reveal their unadjusted data, the appraisal of this paper is solely based on trust that the authors are practicing good science in good faith and they do not need to be scrutinized.”

But there are “glaring signs that the authors didn’t practice good science,” he said.

There were other inconsistencies between the original and corrected supplemental material. For instance, the corrected version shows different results in multiple places when tracking the prevalence of Asperger’s syndrome among kids.

The authors may have been more inclined to produce results that favored vaccination, given that they work at the Statens Serum Institut, a government agency responsible for procuring and supplying vaccines for the national vaccination.

Hviid reported funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which is directly linked to the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk.

“The researchers are integrally involved in pushing vaccines and sweeping vaccine safety under the rug.”

Original study also riddled with flaws, critics say

Even before the corrected materials were added to the study, Hooker and Jablonowski noted a host of flaws.

For instance, the authors failed to mention there were increased risks of certain diseases for kids vaccinated with aluminum-containing vaccines, compared with kids who received no aluminum-containing vaccines.

Before Hviid went on summer break, he told The Defender in an email that his team didn’t include a control group of unvaccinated children who had no aluminum exposure because differences between unvaccinated and vaccinated children likely would have biased the results.

Instead, the team opted to compare groups of vaccinated children who were exposed to different amounts of aluminum, Hviid said.

Yet the study reported results for 15,237 children who were either unvaccinated or vaccinated only with a shot that contains no aluminum, such as the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. The MMR vaccine used in Denmark has no aluminum, according to the authors.

That creates a cohort of children unvaccinated with an aluminum-containing shot, Jablonowski said.

Hooker and Jablonowski compared the outcomes of children who didn’t receive an aluminum-containing vaccine with the outcomes of children who received aluminum-containing vaccines.

“Kids who received an aluminum-containing vaccine were 26% more likely to have atopic dermatitis” than kids who were unvaccinated or only got the MMR shot, Jablonowski said. Those kids were “50% more likely to have allergic rhinoconjunctivitis — and these are really strong, statistically significant signals.”

Jablonowski said the study authors might criticize the analysis he and Hooker conducted for failing to consider possible confounding factors.

“I’d be happy to redo the analysis and account for possible confounding factors, but I’d need the authors to release sufficiently detailed data,” Jablonowski said.

Calls grow for journal to retract study

The findings in the corrected study still maintain the authors’ claim that aluminum-containing vaccinations are not associated with all 50 of the negative health outcomes they analyzed. In fact, their analysis claims protection against 12 categories of disease, including autism.

“These findings are not just counterintuitive — they are biologically absurd,” James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., wrote on Substack. “No plausible mechanism exists by which aluminum salts could prevent neurodevelopmental delay.”

Lyons-Weiler is the founder of IPAK-EDU, an adult online institution of higher learning run by the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.

Lyons-Weiler and other critics are calling for the study’s retraction. He told The Defender the study’s “fatal methodological flaws … violate the principles of valid causal inference.”

Guillemette Crépeaux, Ph.D., associate professor at École Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort, told The Defender that the Annals of Internal Medicine should never have accepted the study — especially with its incorrect supplementary data. “Retraction should be the bare minimum,” she said.

Guillemette said she and her colleagues are writing a rebuttal to the study. They plan to submit it for publication later this summer.

Chris Exley, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminum exposure, told The Defender, “There is no question in my mind that the authors of this study used the data available to them to come to an afore determined conclusion.”

In 2020, Crépeaux and Exley co-authored an article in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology that called for “independent, rigorous and honest science” on aluminum in vaccines.

Exley said the authors of the Danish study should make the data they used available for independent scrutiny. He said:

“I understand that they have already refused such requests and the compliant journal publishing the study is not prepared to press them on this issue. Surprise, surprise.

“Hviid and his band of conspirators are only interested in pedaling nonsense and nonscience to what they and others … believe is a gullible public. I think we have news for them. The times are changing, at long last.”

Watch Jablonowski discuss the Danish study on CHD.TV:

Related articles in The Defender

• Study Claiming No Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism Riddled with Flaws, Critics Say

• 4 Things the New York Times Got Wrong About Aluminum in Vaccines

• 5 Scientific Findings Explain Link Between Vaccines and Autism — Why Do Health Agencies Ignore Them?

• 36% Higher Risk of Asthma in Some Kids Who Had Vaccine-Related Aluminum Exposure, CDC Study Shows

• Study Showing 13% of Kids Have 2 or More Allergy-Related Conditions Overlooks Role of Aluminum and Vaccines

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