Study Finds No Link Between Vaccine Aluminum and Health Problems

Key TakeawaysA study of more than 1.2 million people found no health risks from aluminum in vaccinesResearchers found no link to autism, allergies, asthma or autoimmune diseasesThe study looked at more than 50 chronic illnesses.TUESDAY, July 15, 2025 (HealthDay News) — A new study of more than 1.2 million people found no link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and long-term health problems, including autism, asthma or autoimmune diseases.The research, published July 14 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at 50 chronic conditions. They included 36 autoimmune diseases, nine types of allergies and asthma, and five neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism and ADHD, NBC News reported.Aluminum has long been added to vaccines to help the body build a stronger immune response. But the additive has also become a target for vaccine skeptics, including some public figures who have called it harmful.“Our study addresses many of these concerns and provides clear and robust evidence for the safety of childhood vaccines," senior author Anders Hviid, head of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institute in Denmark, said."This is evidence that parents need to make the best choices for the health of their children," he added.His team used health records from Denmark’s national registry to study people born between 1997 and 2018. They were followed through the end of 2020.Because health data in Denmark is carefully tracked, the team was able to compare kids who received more aluminum in their vaccines before age 2 with those who received less. Unvaccinated children were not part of the study, NBC News said.Ross Kedl, a vaccine expert at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who reviewed the findings, said this type of large-scale research is only possible in countries like Denmark.“[This excellence is] partly because they have, for a long time, had such a unified health system,” Kedl told NBC News. “Everyone is tracked for life from birth and you can go back for many years and ask, ‘Can we find a link between something that happened in the past and in the future?’ ”The study was, in part, a response to a 2022 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded study that had suggested a link between aluminum-containing vaccines and asthma. That study has been widely criticized since. Experts said it failed to distinguish aluminum in vaccines from aluminum from other sources, such as food, water, air and even breast milk.“Aluminum is part of our daily diet and has been since the beginning of time. That is the point people don’t understand,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told NBC News.Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the earlier study didn’t properly account for outside factors.“If you are looking at people who got vaccines that contained aluminum versus those who had fewer, you have to control for confounding factors, you need to know that the only different source of aluminum these people received was from those vaccines,” Offit said.Aluminum is used in some vaccines as an adjuvant — a substance that helps trigger a stronger immune response.“An adjuvant is a substance that alerts the body’s immune response to the vaccine’s antigen," Kedl explained. "Without adjuvants, you actually create tolerance, which is the opposite effect of what you want a vaccine to do.”In the U.S., aluminum salts are used in vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP), as well as for HPV, hepatitis B and pneumonia.“The aluminum that is in vaccines is in the form of extremely small amounts of aluminum salts, which is not the same as elemental aluminum which is a metal,” Hviid said. “It’s really important for parents to understand that we are not injecting metal into children.”Most of the aluminum leaves the body within two weeks, but trace amounts can stay for years.Experts say no single study can prove something is safe, but this new research adds to years of research showing that aluminum in vaccines is not harmful.“One study does not make for a safe vaccine supply or not,” Osterholm said. “It’s the accumulative data that comes from many studies that have been done, that together demonstrate the safety of vaccines.”Hviid, meanwhile, pointed out that vaccines containing aluminum are "the backbone" of childhood immuniation programs.“It is critically important that we keep politics and science apart in this issue," he said. "If not, it is the children, including U.S. children, who are going to suffer the consequences.”More informationChildren's Hospital of Philadelphia has more on aluminum in vaccines.SOURCE: NBC News, July 14, 2025 .What This Means For YouAluminum in childhood vaccines is safe, according to a new study of more than 1.2 million people..Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter

Study Finds No Link Between Vaccine Aluminum and Health Problems

Related Stories