Prominent medical journal refuses RFK's call to retract a vaccine study

A prominent medical journal has refused a call made by the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to retract a study that found that aluminum in vaccines does not pose a health risk to children.

Published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine in mid-July, the study evaluated the safety of aluminum used in childhood vaccines by analyzing vaccination and other health records from over 1.2 million children in Denmark.

Aluminum is used as an "adjuvant" in some vaccines, meaning it's an ingredient that helps stimulate a person's immune response. The adjuvant has been in use for over 80 years and is considered safe, but "concerns about potential harms continue to resurface," the study authors wrote.

The researchers concluded that there is no association between aluminum exposure from early childhood vaccines and 50 conditions, including allergies and autism — both conditions which Kennedy and an organization he chaired previously claimed are caused by aluminum in vaccines.

In an opinion piece published this earlier month on the website TrialSite News, Kennedy attacked the study and called upon the journal to retract it, calling it "badly designed" and accusing the study's authors of manipulating their data.

Now, in an exclusive report from Reuters, the journal's editor-in-chief, Christine Laine, said that "I see no reason for retraction." She added that Kennedy's arguments "do not invalidate what they found, and there's no evidence of scientific misconduct."

In their report, the authors do point out potential limitations of their study — as is customary in peer-reviewed research — including the fact that there may be confounding factors that they haven't accounted for. But the strengths of the paper, especially the size and quality of the dataset, lend strong confidence to the results, Reuters reported.

Despite the well-established safety record of aluminum adjuvants, anti-vaccine activists have gone after the ingredient for being "extremely neurotoxic," as Kennedy once called it. Aluminum is toxic in very high doses, but the quantities found in vaccines are far below these thresholds. In fact, infants typically ingest more aluminum in their food than they do from vaccines.

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"I am used to controversy around vaccine safety studies — especially those that relate to autism, but I have not been targeted by a political figurehead in this way before," the paper's senior author, Anders Hviid, a professor at the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, told Reuters in an email.

Laine said that the journal does not plan to respond to the health secretary directly. However, Hviid refuted many of Kennedy's key arguments in an op-ed of his own that was also published on TrialSite News.

In response to Kennedy's claims that the study was "opaque" because the researchers didn't make the raw data available, Hviid explained that doing so is illegal in Denmark. Data that could reveal information about an individual's health is protected by privacy laws in the E.U. He also pointed out several factual errors Kennedy made, such as the assertion that Hviid is biased because he works for a company that develops vaccines, which he does not.

This isn't the first time that Kennedy has lashed out at those who oppose his vaccine stance. In June, he removed all 17 sitting members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory committee, replacing them with new members known for undermining scientific evidence about vaccines.

According to a report from Bloomberg News published earlier this summer, Kennedy asked this new panel to review vaccines containing aluminum. Such a review could affect at least two dozen vaccines used in the U.S., many of which are part of routine childhood vaccinations.