How the Danish Study on Aluminum in Vaccines Was Designed to Find No Harm

Introduction

The news media are exploding with headlines about a new study out of Denmark purporting to prove that aluminum-containing vaccines do not cause long-term health harms including atopic and allergic diseases, autoimmunity, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

Titled “Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood: A Nationwide Cohort Study”, the study was written by Niklas Worm Andersson et al. and published in Annals of Internal Medicine on July 15.

The senior author—who is typically listed last in the byline in medical journals—is Anders Hviid, who was the lead author of the study “Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study”, published in the same journal in 2019, which the media headlines likewise proclaimed at the time had proven that the MMR vaccine is not associated with autism even in genetically susceptible children.

Dr. Brian Hooker, Dr. Jeet Varia, and I demonstrate, however, why that earlier study’s conclusion does not follow from its findings in our paper “Hviid et al. 2019 Vaccine-Autism Study: Much Ado About Nothing?”, published in the Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine on May 7.

As always, with current media reports, an observational study finding no association between vaccines and harms is touted as conclusive without any kind of critical analysis whatsoever.

This contrasts with media reporting on observational studies that do find associations between vaccines and harms, in which case the studies are invariably characterized as having methodological flaws that call the findings into serious question.

For instance, when researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a study in 2017 finding a nearly 8-fold greater risk of miscarriage among women who were vaccinated during pregnancy and who’d also gotten a flu shot the preceding year, the Washington Post curiously described it as finding “a hint of a possible link”. The Post claimed falsely that it was the first study to ever find a link between flu shots and miscarriage, and it dutifully reminded readers that this was just an observational study that cannot “provide a definitive answer” and had “several limitations” indicating that “the results could be biased”.

Similarly, when CDC researchers published a study in 2022 finding an association between aluminum-containing vaccines and asthma, we were told how “experts caution that more work is needed to confirm the findings” because the study had “important shortcomings”.

Somehow, though, studies finding no association never seem to have any methodological weaknesses so can be considered absolutely conclusive! Imagine that!

Here is a sampling of illustrative headlines telling us what we’re supposed to think about the new study out of Denmark:

• “Study finds no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism, asthma” — NBC News
• “Study Finds No Link Between Vaccine Aluminum and Health Problems” — U.S. News
• “Study: No link between vaccine aluminum, health problems” — UPI
• “New Study Finds No Links Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Chronic Conditions” — Truthout
• “Study finds no evidence aluminum salts in vaccines are tied to higher risk of asthma, other childhood diseases” — STAT
• “Aluminum in Vaccines Not Linked to Chronic Childhood Disorders: Danish Study” — Medscape
• “Aluminum in Vaccines Not Culprit in Kids’ Chronic Diseases, Study Shows” — Medpage Today
• “No Risks Seen With Early Childhood Exposure to Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines” — Physician’s Weekly
• “Aluminum exposure from childhood vaccines not linked to increased risk of certain chronic disorders” — American College of Physicians
• “Large study squashes anti-vaccine talking points about aluminum” — Ars Technica

Since the government and media constantly lie to us, though, about everything, let’s exercise independent thought and—at the risk of committing heresy against the vaccine religion—examine the study for ourselves.

A critical analysis of the new aluminum study reveals that it follows essentially the same playbook as Hviid et al. (2019): it is not merely that the study has methodological flaws resulting in questionable findings but that, like the 2019 MMR-autism study, it was rather designed to find no association.