Aluminum vaccine adjuvants are not causing food allergies

RFK Jr. is, yet again, spreading dangerous and false information on immunology concepts he doesn't understand

If you missed it, RFK Jr. was on Mikhaila Fuller’s podcast (formerly Peterson - yes, she’s Jordan Peterson’s daughter where he said a whole lot of things - none of which were true. Of course, if you’re unaware, Mikhaila Fuller and her dad Jordan Peterson were also part of the Ron Johnson-hosted “expert” roundtable in front of Congress earlier this year (read here) where they similarly spread a lot of falsehoods about basic science concepts and health.

Unfortunately, with the nomination of RFK Jr. to HHS Secretary, this rampant disinformation has the potential to cause even more harm than it already has over the last several decades. And, just to reiterate, RFK Jr., Mikhaila Fuller, Calley Means, Casey Means, Max Lugavere, etc., all make MILLIONS of dollars by spreading lies.

And us scientists who have stepped into the - quite frankly, abusive - fray, are fact-checking their dangerous lies in our “free time” - which most often comes at a cost for us: time, energy, bandwidth. And unfortunately, this is because the media outlets who should be doing this are failing us.

Anyway, I want to address this recent excerpt from RFK Jr.’s appearance on Mikhaila’s podcast, so let’s get into it.

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There is no peanut oil as an excipient in any vaccines.

RFK Jr. claims that aluminum salts used in [certain] vaccines interacts with peanut oil that is an excipient in the same vaccine to cause an allergy to peanuts. This is objectively false.

Why does he believe this? Well, because someone went trolling the online archives and found a patent that was filed in 1961 that mentions using peanut oil as a vaccine excipient. Remember, RFK Jr. is a lawyer so he has access to legal library materials.

What he doesn’t understand is that a patent filing doesn’t actually mean a product exists.

And guess what? That’s the case here. There is no vaccine in existence that has peanut oil or any component of it as an excipient.

An excipient is any inert substance (non-reactive) contained in a medicine product that serves a purpose other than the therapeutic or immunologic purpose. Excipients are specifically geared to improve stability, shelf life, solubility, formulation, delivery, or usability.

They might include:

• Buffers which stabilize the pH of vaccines or liquid medications.

• Lipids which facilitate delivery of the therapeutic to the region of the body where it needs to act.

• Enteric coatings of capsules to prevent stomach acid degradation.

• Solvents like salt water to help dissolve a medication.

One of RFK Jr.’s long-standing tactics is to find obsolete and irrelevant information and then circulate it wildly on podcasts, media appearances, his own profitable disinformation organization Children’s Health Defense, to the point where so many people have seen it, they take it to be true without even thinking about whether it makes sense. This is a great example of that.

Repeat after me: there is no peanut oil in any vaccine formulation.

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We are exposed to orders of magnitude more aluminum merely living on this planet

The next part of his claim relates to people being “pumped” with aluminum through vaccination. This is also false.

We will get to the specifics soon, but aluminum salts - primarily aluminum hydroxide (Al(OH)₃) and aluminum phosphate (AlPO₄) are used in certain vaccines in miniscule quantities to augment the localized immune response.

But aluminum is everywhere.

Aluminum metal is the most common metal on Earth and makes up about 8% of the mass of the Earth’s crust. Adults naturally have between 30 to 50 milligrams of aluminum in their body at any given time, simply through living. Aluminum - primarily in salt and oxide forms - is found ubiquitously in the soil and water.

Aluminum in nature is primarily found in the forms of:

• Aluminum Oxide (Al₂O₃) in bauxite ore

• Aluminum Silicates in rocks, clay, and soil (e.g., feldspar, kaolinite).

• Aluminum Hydroxide (Al(OH)₃ in minerals like gibbsite.

• Alum (Potassium Aluminum Sulfate (KAl(SO₄)₂·12H₂O)): in natural deposits, historically used for food preservation and or dyeing and food preservation.

Fun fact: alum is mentioned in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicinal texts: ashtang hridaya; sphaṭika kṣāra, phitkari, saurashtri, and mingfan. It has been widely used for thousands of years to treat a variety of ailments, including wound antiseptics, deodorants, and more. So technically, aluminum has been studied for thousands of years and has an incredible safety profile.

As a result, aluminum compounds are naturally found in food and water, and adults generally consume between 7 and 9 milligrams of aluminum per day. But guess what? Your excretory system removes 99% of the aluminum you are exposed to, because there aren’t many biological processes that it is needed by. Your kidneys and your tightly regulated physiological processes are always doing their jobs.

Aluminum salts are also found in certain medications like antacids and anti-ulceratives, as well as cosmetic products and certain kitchen products.

For some context, certain vaccines might contain between 0.125 & 0.625 milligrams in a dose.

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The amount of aluminum in certain vaccines is up to 72 TIMES LESS aluminum than you ingest on a daily basis from foods, and up to 400 TIMES LESS aluminum than is in your body at any time.

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So no, you aren’t being “pumped full” of aluminum. Aluminum adjuvants have been used for nearly 100 years and have an incredible safety profile. In fact, one of the common ones, Aluminum Hydroxide (Al(OH)₃, is a naturally-occurring substance (just to play to the appeal to nature fallacy folks).

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Another trope that arises is that injection is different - in terms of how our body is exposed to the aluminum - compared to ingestion.

Our bodies process intramuscular and ingested aluminum salts in the same way: through filtration of our blood and excretion by the kidneys in urine.

We will get to the adjuvant process in a minute, but the aluminum in a vaccine remains at the injection site for a period of time where it forms a local depot. This is how it does its adjuvanting job.

After that, it is slowly transferred into the bloodstream where it is bound up by proteins like transferrin and albumin to be filtered by the kidneys and excreted in urine. Yes, your natural detoxification process. It’s how your body gets rid of all the things you don’t need any longer.

Within days, over 95% of that minuscule quantity (0.125 to 0.625 milligrams) is removed in urine, that universal waste product.

Ingested aluminum, that 7-9 mg you eat every day, is processed primarily through excretion in feces. A small percentage of it (between 1-10%) is absorbed into the bloodstream, just like the aluminum in vaccines, binds to transferrin and albumin, is filtered by the kidneys and also excreted in urine.

It also needs to be repeated (unfortunately): vaccines are not injected into the bloodstream.

Vaccines we receive are administered intramuscularly (DTaP, Tdap, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, HPV, Influenza (inactivated), Typhoid polysaccharide, Pneumococcal, COVID-19), subcutaneously (MMR, Varicella, Yellow Fever) intradermally (BCG), orally (Typhoid capsule, Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV), Rotavirus), or via nasal spray (attenuated Influenza). None are intravenous.

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Alright, let’s get to the last bit.

Aluminum adjuvants are not allergenic.

People who make this claim do not understand the difference between a localized immune response to a foreign antigen versus oral allergic response to a food antigen.

If aluminum compounds were allergenic, people would be having allergic reactions constantly, because of how ubiquitous aluminum is. Remember: it’s the most abundant metal on Earth. Common sense tells you that this claim is incorrect.

Aluminum salts in vaccines augment the localized immune response at the injection site. They allow us to use a smaller dose of the actual vaccine component (the antigen, read more here) to elicit a similar magnitude of memory immunity.

Aluminum adjuvants create a little storage depot at the injection site where they bind some of the antigen up, to slow the release of the antigens to the immune system. This process is called adsorption.

What this does is instead of dispersing the antigen all at once where only a finite number of innate immune cells can respond, activate, migrate to the lymph nodes, and recruit memory immune cells in the lymph nodes, the salts delay the dispersal which improves the magnitude of the overall memory responses, include T cell memory and levels of antibodies produced by B cells. Pretty cool, right?

Aluminum adjuvants activate antigen-presenting cells (APCs) such as dendritic cells and macrophages more efficiently by adsorbing the antigen molecules. This improves the uptake of those antigens by the innate immune cells and their presentation to memory immune cells, T cell and B cells.

Read more in the below article on the immune response to infectious diseases:

By improving the adsorption, this improves the overall uptake by those innate immune cells and the presentation of antigen to T cells. For a really simplified explanation, refer to my tattoo:

This particular process is especially advantageous for the humoral immune response, the arm of the adaptive immune system that leads to B cell activation, plasma cell formation, and antibody production. So pathogens that are best protected against through strong neutralizing antibody responses like tetanus (where the disease is caused by a toxin produced by the bacterium), this adjuvant mechanism is particularly important.

Vaccines containing aluminum salt adjuvants include: DTap, Tdap, Hepatitis B, HBV, Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b), Pneumococcal conjugate, Hepatitis A, Rabies, and Anthrax.

All of these vaccines, and the aluminum salts themselves, have been extensively studied and tested for decades. They are safe and effective.

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The final part of misinformation.

It is incredibly important to understand that this process: depot formation, adsorption of antigen, and delayed release to antigen-presenting cells is wildly different in all immunological ways than a food allergy.

Food allergies have nothing to do with vaccines.

Food allergies result from lack of oral tolerance in the gut-associated lymphoid tissue after consuming certain food molecules.

More detail on this topic in the future, but people who lack even basic immunology knowledge simply assume that all “immune responses” are one and the same. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Food allergies are the result of a complex process with two phases, sensitization and elicitation. This occurs in the GI tract, in a specialized immune compartment called the gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT).

More than that, the allergic response to food allergens is mediated by different components of the immune system than which respond to vaccines and generate memory immunity. Food allergies are dominated by an IgE-antibody based reponse, where mast cells carry around bound IgE antibodies that are specific for certain food molecules. When they interact with one, for example, peanut proteins like Ara h1, Ara h2, Ara h3, this leads to activation of mast cells and degranulation, where they dump packages of inflammatory chemicals like histamine they are carrying around.

Even without a more in depth explanation, I’m sure you can see how different this is.

Not only are there different immune system components involved in vaccine responses (with or without adjuvant), these responses are not even happening in the same location of the body.

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These claims from RFK Jr. and his acolytes are not just wrong, they cause serious harm.

Health and science disinformation undermines objective truth, erodes critical thinking, scare people about critical health interventions that save lives, and they legitimize the proliferation of unchecked lies.

It is not something to be proud of to brag about rejecting expertise or factual information. Yet this era of celebrity over expertise, podcast content over critically analyzed data, anti-intellectualism over education is truly dangerous. We all have an obligation to stand up for reality, because this impacts all of us.

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We all must join in the fight for science.

Thank you for supporting evidence-based science communication. With outbreaks of preventable diseases, refusal of evidence-based medical interventions, propagation of pseudoscience by prominent public “personalities”, it’s needed now more than ever.

Stay skeptical,

Andrea

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“ImmunoLogic” is written by Dr. Andrea Love, PhD - immunologist and microbiologist. She works full-time in life sciences biotech and has had a lifelong passion for closing the science literacy gap and combating pseudoscience and health misinformation as far back as her childhood. This newsletter and her science communication on her social media pages are born from that passion. Follow on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Facebook, or support the newsletter by subscribing below: