RFK Jr.'s Aluminum Lie
No, aluminum vaccine adjuvants aren't causing autism, allergies, or other health issues. RFK Jr.'s conspiracy hinges on a 1961 patent, zero evidence, and total ignorance of immunology.
This newsletter is free, but consider supporting a biomedical scientist trying to combat the war on health by upgrading to a paid subscription:
RFK Jr is a liar. Full stop.
He has been for decades — it’s what has led to his profitable litigation career and his swerve into wellness disinformation. His tactic is always the same: recycle old lies for new audiences. His latest? The egregiously false claim that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines are causing peanut allergies, autism, and a myriad of other health issues.
He’s lying. Like he always does.
In fact, this peanut allergy lie popped up almost this same time last year when he was on Mikhaila Fuller’s podcast (that’s Jordan Peterson’s daughter, FYI), and I similarly debunked it then.
But given that he has now literally been put in charge of US health policy by the US Senate, we need to call out his lies — loudly, repeatedly, and without apology.
Aluminum salts used as vaccine adjuvants are not causing any harmful health issues: allergies, autism, or otherwise.
RFK Jr., on the other hand, is a threat to global health.
Let’s dig in.
We are not “pumped” with aluminum through vaccines. RFK Jr is lying. As usual.
Aluminum is everywhere on the planet.
The first part of RFK Jr’s claim is that people are “pumped” with aluminum through vaccination. This is false.
Aluminum metal is the most common metal on Earth. It makes up about 8% of the mass of the Earth’s crust. Aluminum compounds, primarily salts and oxides, are found everywhere in soil and water:
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.
As a result, these aluminum compounds are naturally in food and water. Adults consume between 7 and 9 milligrams of aluminum per day through these routes.
Adults naturally have between 30 to 50 milligrams of aluminum in their body at any given time, simply by living on this planet.
Here’s the context: select vaccines might contain between 0.125 & 0.625 milligrams aluminum in a dose.
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.
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).
Here’s the part RFK Jr never mentions: your kidneys and excretory system removes 99% of the aluminum you are exposed to, because not many biological processes require aluminum. Your kidneys and your tightly regulated physiological processes are always doing their jobs.
It’s also worth reminding everyone (and I will, every time we discuss chemicals): aluminum metal is different than chemical compounds that contain aluminum as part of their structure.
Remember: Chemicals are not the sum of their parts. These bonds dramatically change everything about a chemical compound. That’s why table salt, sodium chloride (NaCl), doesn’t explode when you put it in water. Sodium explodes when you put it in water, though!
That’s true when discussing thimerosal—still not mercury—and it’s true when discussing aluminum salts in vaccines, anti-perspirants, and antacids.
Aluminum salts improve vaccine safety and effectiveness.
You might be asking, why do we even use aluminum salts in vaccines in the first place? The short version: They allow us to use a smaller dose of the active ingredient in a vaccine (the antigen of the pathogen in question, more here) to elicit a similarly robust memory immune response.
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 at the injection site. This is what the term adjuvant means.
Aluminum salts are also found in certain medications like antacids and anti-ulceratives, as well as cosmetic products and certain kitchen products.
Fun fact — for the “natural healing” crowd: 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.
We are exposed to orders of magnitude more aluminum merely living on this planet than anything in a vaccine.
Injected aluminum salts aren’t processed differently than aluminum we eat.
Another trope RFK Jr and his allies claim? That intramuscular injection (no vaccines are injected “directly into the bloodstream”, people) somehow makes that miniscule aluminum exposure far worse than the 400-times higher levels circulating in your bloodstream….already. Or the 72-times higher levels you eat…every day. This is also false.
Our bodies process intramuscular and ingested aluminum salts the exact same way: through filtration of our blood and excretion by the kidneys in urine.
Aluminum salts in a vaccine remain at the site of injection (in the muscle tissue) for a period of time where it forms a local depot. This is how these salts do their adjuvanting job. We will get to the adjuvant process shortly, but 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 and excretion 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 that might have been in a given vaccine (0.125 to 0.625 milligrams) is removed in urine, your universal waste product.
Ingested aluminum — the 7–9 mg you eat every day — is processed the same exact way! Roughly 95% of the aluminum you consume is absorbed into the bloodstream, bound by the same proteins, filtered by the kidneys and excreted in urine. Only a small percentage is processed through bile and excreted in feces.
Literally processed the exact same way — whether a tiny fraction of exposure from a vaccine or you ate a big salad.
Aluminum salts are not allergenic.
Aluminum salts have been used as adjuvants in vaccines for decades because of their effectiveness and safety. But guess what? They are also used for allergy immunotherapy because they are not allergenic. That’s right, aluminum salts don’t cause allergies—to peanuts, or anything else.
If aluminum were allergenic, humans would be in anaphylaxis 24/7 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.
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 particularly advantageous for the humoral immune response, the adaptive immune response that leads to B cell activation, plasma cell formation, and antibody production.
So for 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: Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis combinations (DTap, Tdap, Td), Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), HPV (human papillomavirus), 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.
Peanut oil is not used in any vaccines. RFK Jr is lying. As usual.
Okay, another bit of RFK Jr’s big lie. RFK Jr claims that aluminum salts used in [certain] vaccines cause peanut allergies because those compounds interact with peanut oil used as an excipient in the same vaccine. 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. What he doesn’t understand — even though he has been corrected by me and many of my colleagues many times over — is that a patent filing doesn’t actually mean a product exists.
That’s the case here. There. Is. No. Peanut. Oil. In. Any. Vaccine.
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.
And finally, a final clarification to address RFK Jr’s disinformation.
Food allergies have absolutely nothing to do with vaccines.
They involve entirely different biological systems, different cells, different tissues, and different immunological programming.
The process by which adjuvants work: forming a depot, adsorption of antigen, and delayed release to antigen-presenting cells is completely different—in all immunological ways—to a food allergy.
Food allergies have everything to do with things that enter your body through your digestive tract. They result when your gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) does not establish oral tolerance after you eat certain food molecules. Food allergies are the result of a complex process with two immunological phases, sensitization and elicitation.
The allergic response to food allergens is mediated by different components of the immune system than those that react to vaccines and generate memory immunity. Food allergies are dominated by an IgE-antibody based response, where mast cells carrying bound IgE antibodies specific for certain food molecules get activated.
When a mast cell interacts 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, you can see how profoundly 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.
All “immune responses” are not created equal. And that couldn’t be better illustrated by the wild disparities between oral allergies and vaccination.
These claims from RFK Jr. and his acolytes are not just wrong, they cause serious harm. And now that he sits at the helm of HHS, these lies aren’t just noise — they are becoming national policy.
Health and science disinformation undermines objective truth, erodes critical thinking, scares people away from critical health interventions that save lives, and it legitimizes 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.
Truth isn’t optional in public health. And right now, a liar is running it.
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
ImmunoLogic is written by Dr. Andrea Love, PhD - immunologist and microbiologist. She works full-time in life sciences biotech and has a lifelong passion for closing the science literacy gap and combating pseudoscience and health misinformation. Follow on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Facebook, or support the newsletter by subscribing:
Well done with great diagrams. We get lots of Aluminum Hydroxide from antacids, and the safety profile is well established.
I recently got into an argument with a pharmacist who claimed that the aluminium in my Rx antiperspirant (Drysol) was dangerous