RFK Jr -- the antiscience health secretary

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I tracked down the paper here: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

What are the 2 or 3 specific issues you found? I would be happy to go through them. If I am wrong on this, I want to be corrected. I am not a biologist or a doctor, but I am a mathematician and I have done physics research and math research. I have a fairly solid understanding of statistics and have taught college level math courses. If the criticisms are about the statistical methods that were used (which is what seems to be claimed), I may be able to address the issues one way or another.

I agree. Science doesn't prove anything. I didn't claim this study proves safety. An absence of evidence of risk is consistent with safety though. If well conducted studies attempting to find a link between aluminum and adverse health outcomes are not able to find a definitive link, then it is more likely to be the case that the aluminum isn't causing the health issues, and our time and effort should instead be spent looking for other causes (maybe pollutants).

*All kids given over X vaccines excluded from results. Okay I can formulate justification and outliers can be anomalous, but the optics are terrible for a "this is totally safe" piece and I understand the cutoff was very modest by today's childhood vaccine schedules

*Children given no vaccines excluded. I can see the justification but where's your control? If vaccine proponents preconceptions bear out you'd expect worse health outcomes in this group anyway, so include it (caveated) for completeness and let the critics be the ones trying to explain it away.

*Thirdly - all infant mortality excluded. Felt wrong, given we're supposedly looking for toxic effects, was slightly hesitant but I've seen it included on other criticisms.

RFK jnr makes all these criticisms and more and undoubtedly more eloquently in his statement on it. Overall it reeks that they've spent so long fine tuning the selection criteria you could probably use it to prove the innocence of vladimir putin.

As for Hepatitis B, Trump slanted his words to make it sound like the baby would only get it from having unprotected sex.

The reality is that the mother can have Hepatitis B from unprotected sex and not exhibit any symptoms. She can pass it to the baby who will be more greatly impacted by it than the mother. Also, if I read it correctly, a baby with Hepatitis B is not likely to exhibit symptoms early on. If not vaccinated for Hepatitis B and not regularly tested for Hepatitis B, if the baby acquires Hepatitis B, by the time he shows symptoms, he will already be seriously harmed.

That harm can be dispensed with entirely in most cases if the baby receives a vaccination for it before being released from the hospital.

You do know that expectant mothers are tested for hepatitis B and C before birth to protect the unborn child, meaning that the doctors would know about it and treat the mother before birth.

Actually, not. The CDC recommends testing but not all mothers go through with it.

No, not all expectant mothers choose to be tested but approximately 85% do for Hepatitis B. This means their newborn baby would have zero need for a hep b vaccine within their first day of life, yet still forced upon the innocent child.

Okay. Here are my thoughts for each. Once again, I am not a medical doctor. My background is in math and physics.



In supplemental table 1, we are given the exact cutoff criteria:

"Received >3 diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, and Haemophilus influenzae type b (DTP) vaccines, >3 Hepatitis B (HBV) vaccines, or >3 pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) vaccines by age 2"

In the "Vaccinations and Aluminum Content" section, the paper mentions that a typical vaccination schedule is 1 DTP vaccine. It doesn't mention any HBV vaccination, but mentioned 1 PCV vaccine often being given with the DTP. This means any child receiving 3 times the normal amount of vaccines in the records is considered abnormal.

Based on this criteria, we see that a total of 34,547 kids were excluded for this reason. With a total of 1,384,357 candidate participants, this means approximately 2.4% of the initial candidates were rejected for an implausible number of vaccines. It would be nice if the paper explained why. I can think of a few reasons why they might be excluded (perhaps there is concern about these being clerical errors in the paperwork, perhaps these are outliers and will change the analysis, perhaps the study only wants to focus on children with a typical vaccination schedule compared to non-vaccinated children), but the reason should be given.

As a side note, the other rejection criteria were given, and the largest rejection categories seem reasonable to me. I will give brief details of these, with my thoughts below:

Missing Covariate Values: If the mother smoked during pregnancy, this will have a large effect. If it is unknown if the mother smoked, this is a problem in any analysis.

Mothers not living in Denmark in the 2y before birth: This means there will be different environmental factors for these mothers than the other mothers. We want to control for this.

Preexisting Conditions diagnosed within the first 2y of life: Any series preexisting condition (like heart or liver failure) will likely result in many other outcomes within the next few years. This will make it unclear if any outcomes are from preexisting conditions or vaccines.

Emigration, death, or disappearance from registers within first 2y of life: The study is concerned with aged from 2y to 5y. These will not have records within this timeframe, if the child disappeared from the system before age 2.



The control is the children who were vaccinated without aluminum in the vaccines. A non-vaccinated child would not be as good of a control, since we are not testing if vaccines cause adverse effects. We are checking if the aluminum content in the vaccines causes worse outcomes than the aluminum free vaccines. If we used unvaccinated children as a control, we would not be able to distinguish which effects are from the aluminum in the vaccines and which effects are from the other ingredients in the vaccines.



With infant mortality, it was excluded because the study is specifically considering what happens after age 2. We also don't know from the study how many infants died before receiving any vaccines. It was mentioned in the at the end of the "Study Population" section that 335 of the participants died between ages 2 and 5. This is 0.03%. The study didn't make it clear what the causes of death were. Given that the amount of deaths is 1/20th of the amount of children who emigrated between the ages 2 and 5, I think it isn't unreasonable to exclude them from the data (but, if the causes of death are known, including those who died due to medical reasons would be more complete).



Of the 1,384,357 candidate participants, 1,224,176 were included. This means just under 90% of candidates were included. About 15,000 of the excluded participants were due to having mothers not living in Denmark in the 2y before birth and due to lack of covariate data. Adjusting for this, only about 4% of candidates were excluded.


After typing this up, I saw some of the comments on the paper bring up additional concerns. Most of the comments get direct responses from the authors and the editor. You may find it worth reading them, as the authors will know more than me about their analysis, the data set, and the medicine.

Aluminum is very abundant in the environment. The amount that a child gets from vaccines is miniscule compared to what they get from other sources. They get more from breast milk.

If the tiny amount of aluminum a child gets has very adverse effects on his health, that kid is in for a lifetime of misery.