A study published in 2018 discovered high amounts of aluminum in the brain tissue of people with autism. The picture you see above is from the study, showing aluminum in brain tissue. Five people were used in the study, comprising of four males and one female, all between the ages of 14-50. Each of their brains contained what the authors considered unsafe and high amounts of aluminum compared to brain tissues of patients with other diseases where high brain aluminum content is common, like Alzheimer’s disease, for example.

The authors state that,

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Human exposure to aluminium has been implicated in ASD with conclusions being equivocal [7], [8], [9], [10]. To-date the majority of studies have used hair as their indicator of human exposure to aluminium while aluminium in blood and urine have also been used to a much more limited extent. Paediatric vaccines that include an aluminium adjuvant are an indirect measure of infant exposure to aluminium and their burgeoning use has been directly correlated with increasing prevalence of ASD [11]. Animal models of ASD continue to support a connection with aluminium and to aluminium adjuvants used in human vaccinations in particular [12].

They note that the aluminum content of brain tissues from donors with a diagnosis of ASD was “extremely high” (Table 1).  And they make the point that they “recorded some of the highest values for brain aluminum content ever measured in healthy or diseased tissues in these male ASD donors.”

My group has measured the aluminum content of probably more than one-hundred human brains, and these brain tissues taken from the individuals with a diagnosis of autism were some of the highest we’ve measured, bar none….In this relatively young group of people, some 13, 14, 15 years of age, we saw more aluminum than we’ve seen in almost any other circumstance, so this in itself is a very important finding.

Perhaps equally important if not more important were the microscopy studies. The microscopy studies enabled us to identify where the aluminum was in the brain tissue. When we looked at our brains of the people with a diagnosis of autism, we found something completely different, something we’ve never seen before. We found that the majority of aluminum was actually inside cells, intracellular.

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Some of it was inside neurons, but actually the majority of it was inside non-neuronal cell populations. So we found that these cells were heavily loaded with aluminum. We also saw evidence that cells in the lymph, and in the blood, were passing into the brain. So they were carrying with them a cargo of aluminum, from the body into the brain. This is the first time in any human brain tissue that we have seen this so this is a standout, and as yet unique observation in autism. For myself, it very much implicates aluminum in the aetiology of autism, that doesn’t mean that aluminum causes it, but it means it’s almost certainly playing a role. – Dr. Dr. Christopher Exley, a Professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry at Keele University, lead author of the study cited above.

In this interview, Exley answers a lot of questions, but the part that caught my attention, similar to what was said above, was:

We have looked at what happens to the aluminum adjuvant when it’s injected and we have shown that certain types of cells come to the injection site and take up the aluminum inside them. You know, these same cells we also see in the brain tissue in autism. So, for the first time we have a link that honestly I had never expected to find between aluminum as an adjuvant in vaccines and that same aluminum potentially could be carried by those same cells across the blood brain barrier into the brain tissue where it could deposit the aluminum and produce a disease, Encephalopathy (brain damage), it could produce the more severe and disabling form of autism. This is a really shocking finding for us.

How Does Aluminum In Vaccines Differ From Other Sources of Aluminum?

Despite the fact that only a small amount of aluminum is contained in aluminum containing vaccines, it’s delivery to the body is different than the aluminum we take in from our food, for example.

When you inject aluminum, it goes into a different compartment of your body. It doesn’t come into that same mechanism of excretion. So, and of course it can’t because that’s the whole idea of aluminum adjuvants, aluminum adjuvants are meant to stick around and allow that antigen to be presented over and over and over again persistently, otherwise you wouldn’t put an adjuvant in in the first place. It can’t be inert, because if it were inert it couldn’t do the things it does. It can’t be excreted because again it couldn’t provide that prolonged exposure of the antigen to your immune system. – Dr. Christopher Shaw –  Canadian neuroscientist and professor of ophthalmology at the University of British Columbia (source)

Many scientists presented facts about vaccines and vaccine safety at the recent Global Health Vaccine Safety summit hosted by the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and the topic of adjuvants was brought up.

Dr. Martin Howell Friede, Coordinator of Initiative For Vaccine Research at the World Health Organization, brought up the topic of vaccine adjuvants like aluminum, for example. In certain vaccines, without these adjuvants the vaccine simply doesn’t work. Dr. Friede mentioned that there are clinical studies that blame adjuvants for adverse events seen as a result of administering vaccines, and how people in general often blame adverse reactions to vaccines being the result of the vaccine adjuvant. He mentioned aluminum specifically.

He showed concern given the fact that “without adjuvants, we are not going to have the next generation of vaccines.”

He also stated that:

When we add an adjuvant, it’s because it is essential. We do not add adjuvants to vaccines because we want to do so, but when we add them it adds to the complexity. And I give courses every year on ‘how do you develop vaccines’ and ‘how do you make vaccines’ and the first lesson is, while you are making your vaccine, if you can avoid using an adjuvant, please do so. Lesson two is, if you’re going to use an adjuvant, use one that has a history of safety, and lesson three is, if you’re not going to do that, think very carefully.

So, does the aluminum adjuvant in vaccines have a “history of safety?”

According to a study published as far back as 2011 in Current Medical Chemistry 

Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted. Experimental research, however, clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. (source)

A year after this,

A study published in BioMed Central (also cited in the study above) in 2013 found more cause for concern:

Intramuscular injection of alum-containing vaccine was associated with the appearance of aluminum deposits in distant organs, such as spleen and brain where they were still detected one year after injection. Both fluorescent materials injected into muscle translocated to draining lymph nodes (DLNs) and thereafter were detected associated with phagocytes in blood and spleen. Particles linearly accumulated in the brain up to the six-month endpoint; they were first found in perivascular CD11b+ cells and then in microglia and other neural cells. DLN ablation dramatically reduced the biodistribution. Cerebral translocation was not observed after direct intravenous injection, but significantly increased in mice with chronically altered blood-brain-barrier. Loss/gain-of-function experiments consistently implicated CCL2 in systemic diffusion of Al-Rho particles captured by monocyte-lineage cells and in their subsequent neurodelivery. Stereotactic particle injection pointed out brain retention as a factor of progressive particle accumulation…

The study went on to conclude that “continuously escalating doses of this poorly biodegradable adjuvant in the population may become insidiously unsafe.”

These authors followed up in and published a study study in 2015 emphasized:

Evidence that aluminum-coated particles phagocytozed in the injected muscle and its draining lymph nodes can disseminate within phagocytes throughout the body and slowly accumulate in the brain further suggests that alum safety should be evaluated in the long term.

I think it’s also important to mention that in 2018, a paper published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry found that almost 100 percent of the intramuscularly injected aluminum in mice as vaccine adjuvants was absorbed into the systemic circulation and traveled to different sites in the body such as the brain, the joints, and the spleen, where it accumulated and was retained for years post-vaccination. (source)

The Takeaway

This is simply information, it’s science, which never ceases to question. It should not be labelled as “anti-vax,” and those who believe that aluminum adjuvants should not be considered a cause for concern should simply explain why, and provide evidence and studies to back up their points. I have a hard time seeing why most people would not want to question this, as there is clearly more room to make our vaccines even more safer and effective.