Starting a new comment chain here for the debate on immune cell transport of aluminum:
A pretty succinct argument with citations is given here, claiming that injected aluminum hydroxide is in an insoluble state above ph7.35, so immune cells capture it.
I guess after that, it’s assumed they’ll take it through the blood brain barrier, and drop it when / where they die? For the ones that die in the brain, and they don’t need to drop very much to cause a problem, because brain Al levels are usually very low and are retained with extremely long half life.
I don’t know whether to trust the argument. It doesn’t seem obviously crazy?
The theory seems possible to straightforwardly confirm or refute with animal studies. E.g. just give a soluble aluminum iv to group A and a vaccine injection to group B, and then compare the amounts that get loaded into bone tissue vs brain tissue after a while. Kinda weird that this has never been done; is it really that hard to set up such a study?
They did this and it was fine. Reference levels are around 1 mg/kg for humans. Yes, immune cells gobbled up the aluminum and spread it around the body. Some of it went to the brain, raising the local AL levels. No control group is a bit sus. And this is with an 18 ug injection into ~35g mice. That’s like a 500 ug injection into a 1kg baby. C57 are the wild-type mice, btw.
Nice! Shame the error bars on this are super large—in this figure I think that’s not even a confidence interval, it’s a single standard error.
Not sure if this is useful for anything yet, especially give the large uncertainty, but I think we have the tools now to make two different kinds of rough estimates about brain loading of Al from vaccines.
Estimate 1: Assume immune transport. Resulting load of between 1 − 2 mg / kg of Al in dry brain, since this study suggests about 0 − 1 mg/kg increase in Al. [I’m using a liberal upper confidence here and assuming it’s natural to generalize using the absolute amount that got added to the mouse brain, rather than % added from baseline. If we used %’s it’d be somewhat less.]
reasoning: If we take a 18ug injection into 35g mouse, that’s like 1.5mg into 3kg baby at birth, or like 5mg into a 10kg one-year-old child. So, this comparison maps pretty reasonably to the load of the vaccine schedule. Eyeballing from that figure, it suggests the vaccine schedule yields a 0 − 1 mg/kg increase of Al content in dry brain, using a liberal interpretation of the standard errors for the upper end.
Estimate 2: Assume accumulation is linear with respect to Al blood levels. Comparing blood reference levels to estimate a multiple on the relevant rate of gain in Al, the end result is 1.67 − 2.33 mg/kg level of Al / g dry brain weight at age 1.
reasoning:
Some studies are of the opinion that healthy people have about 5ug/L of Al concentration in blood. Source: this review says:
1. Elshamaa et al. (2010) compared serum Al in 43 children on chronic renal dialysis (where dialysate Al was less than 10 mg/L) to serum Al in 43 healthy children. The dialysis patients used Ca acetate or carbonate to control circulating phosphate, and none of these children received Al-containing phosphate binders. Serum Al was significantly higher (18.4 +- 4.3 mcg/L) in renal patients than in healthy referents (6.5 +-1.6 mcg/L). The source of the elevated serum Al in these cases appeared to be erythropoietin (EPO).
2. By way of comparison, plasma and serum Al concentrations in healthy humans range from less than 1.6 to 6 mg/L (median = 3.2 mg/L or 0.12 mM)
Maybe we should assume that the healthy aluminum reference level is slightly but not hugely higher in 0-1 age children, due to their reduced glomerular filtration rate—at worst, doubled?
Karwowski et al 2018 shows a median blood level of about 15 ug/L in their sample of vaccinated children, and the mean is presumably much higher.
Interpreting this as doubling or tripling of the blood level, that would double or triple the rate of accumulation.
If we are to assume that the reference level of 1 mg/kg would be maintained in the “control” child over time, and the child triples in size from age 0 − 1 year, then tripling the rate of total aluminum addition over that year would result a total… 2.33 mg / kg dry brain in the healthy 1 year old child’s brain. Doubling, results in 1. 67 mg/ kg
The 15 ug/L figure was just the first one I found—the study actually noted that most others have found lower (5-10 ug/L) levels in children.
Instead of working backwards, why not just compare blood AL levels in matched vaccinated and unvaccinated children? Different countries have different vaccination schedules and so on. I’m not digging further because I should be doing other stuff, but it’s a good lead.
I couldn’t find any reference Al levels for childrens’ brains.
1.67mg/g of Aluminum in a one-year-old’s brain doesn’t pass the sanity check. I think the above chart has a typo—that should be ug/g, not mg/g. Otherwise the mice would be very dead! Also, normal Al levels in the brain are around 1 ug/g, a mouse has a brain mass massing 0.4g (dry mass ~0.3g), and 1mg/g would imply ~0.3 mg of Al, far more than injected in the first place.
in premature infants fed orally, mean AL level is 5 mcg/L, SD of 3
another study of very young infants 4 − 5 mcg/L, SD of <1
It seems sensible to estimate that if 5 mcg/L is normal for newborns, and normal for older children, that it should be normal at age 1 as well.
I also found another study in China, which cited a geometric mean of >50 mcg/L. I guess either pollution or poor measurement equipment can totally wreck things.
Starting a new comment chain here for the debate on immune cell transport of aluminum:
A pretty succinct argument with citations is given here, claiming that injected aluminum hydroxide is in an insoluble state above ph7.35, so immune cells capture it.
I guess after that, it’s assumed they’ll take it through the blood brain barrier, and drop it when / where they die? For the ones that die in the brain, and they don’t need to drop very much to cause a problem, because brain Al levels are usually very low and are retained with extremely long half life.
I don’t know whether to trust the argument. It doesn’t seem obviously crazy?
Vaccine advocate literature tries to contradict the claim by stating “all of the aluminum present in vaccines enters the bloodstream” but is ignoring rather than countering the argument.
The theory seems possible to straightforwardly confirm or refute with animal studies. E.g. just give a soluble aluminum iv to group A and a vaccine injection to group B, and then compare the amounts that get loaded into bone tissue vs brain tissue after a while. Kinda weird that this has never been done; is it really that hard to set up such a study?
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1186/1741-7015-11-99
They did this and it was fine. Reference levels are around 1 mg/kg for humans. Yes, immune cells gobbled up the aluminum and spread it around the body. Some of it went to the brain, raising the local AL levels. No control group is a bit sus. And this is with an 18 ug injection into ~35g mice. That’s like a 500 ug injection into a 1kg baby. C57 are the wild-type mice, btw.
Nice! Shame the error bars on this are super large—in this figure I think that’s not even a confidence interval, it’s a single standard error.
Not sure if this is useful for anything yet, especially give the large uncertainty, but I think we have the tools now to make two different kinds of rough estimates about brain loading of Al from vaccines.
Estimate 1: Assume immune transport. Resulting load of between 1 − 2 mg / kg of Al in dry brain, since this study suggests about 0 − 1 mg/kg increase in Al. [I’m using a liberal upper confidence here and assuming it’s natural to generalize using the absolute amount that got added to the mouse brain, rather than % added from baseline. If we used %’s it’d be somewhat less.]
reasoning:
If we take a 18ug injection into 35g mouse, that’s like 1.5mg into 3kg baby at birth, or like 5mg into a 10kg one-year-old child. So, this comparison maps pretty reasonably to the load of the vaccine schedule. Eyeballing from that figure, it suggests the vaccine schedule yields a 0 − 1 mg/kg increase of Al content in dry brain, using a liberal interpretation of the standard errors for the upper end.
Estimate 2: Assume accumulation is linear with respect to Al blood levels. Comparing blood reference levels to estimate a multiple on the relevant rate of gain in Al, the end result is 1.67 − 2.33 mg/kg level of Al / g dry brain weight at age 1.
reasoning:
Some studies are of the opinion that healthy people have about 5ug/L of Al concentration in blood. Source: this review says:
Maybe we should assume that the healthy aluminum reference level is slightly but not hugely higher in 0-1 age children, due to their reduced glomerular filtration rate—at worst, doubled?
Karwowski et al 2018 shows a median blood level of about 15 ug/L in their sample of vaccinated children, and the mean is presumably much higher.
Interpreting this as doubling or tripling of the blood level, that would double or triple the rate of accumulation.
If we are to assume that the reference level of 1 mg/kg would be maintained in the “control” child over time, and the child triples in size from age 0 − 1 year, then tripling the rate of total aluminum addition over that year would result a total… 2.33 mg / kg dry brain in the healthy 1 year old child’s brain. Doubling, results in 1. 67 mg/ kg
edited to fix units!
A couple of things:
The 15 ug/L figure was just the first one I found—the study actually noted that most others have found lower (5-10 ug/L) levels in children.
Instead of working backwards, why not just compare blood AL levels in matched vaccinated and unvaccinated children? Different countries have different vaccination schedules and so on. I’m not digging further because I should be doing other stuff, but it’s a good lead.
I couldn’t find any reference Al levels for childrens’ brains.
1.67mg/g of Aluminum in a one-year-old’s brain doesn’t pass the sanity check. I think the above chart has a typo—that should be ug/g, not mg/g. Otherwise the mice would be very dead! Also, normal Al levels in the brain are around 1 ug/g, a mouse has a brain mass massing 0.4g (dry mass ~0.3g), and 1mg/g would imply ~0.3 mg of Al, far more than injected in the first place.
whoops, fixed my units. got too used to seeing it written in mcg/g!
some findings of blood levels
Paper from 2011 titled:
Wide variation in reference values for aluminum levels in children
This paper is from 1992:
cites two studies:
in premature infants fed orally,
mean AL level is 5 mcg/L, SD of 3
another study of very young infants
4 − 5 mcg/L, SD of <1
It seems sensible to estimate that if 5 mcg/L is normal for newborns, and normal for older children, that it should be normal at age 1 as well.
I also found another study in China, which cited a geometric mean of >50 mcg/L. I guess either pollution or poor measurement equipment can totally wreck things.