In a newly circulating video, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. claims that the aluminum in the hepatitis B vaccine, especially when given to newborns, might cause lifelong allergies by triggering immune reactions to substances in the environment or in the vaccine itself, like peanut oil or other proteins.

Aluminum salts have been used in vaccines since the 1930s to help the body build a stronger immune response. Scientists have studied them for a long time and found them to be safe.. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology explains that for many years, scientists have known that aluminum in vaccines can activate different parts of the immune system, including ones that make IgE, a type of antibody. But there’s no strong proof that vaccines in childhood cause long-lasting IgE levels that would lead to allergies.

While an individual study or preprint might claim otherwise, comprehensive reviews have found no credible evidence linking aluminum in vaccines to an increased risk of allergic conditions

Vaccines undergo a lot of safety testing before they are allowed to be used. The CDC states that vaccines with aluminum are safe, and there is no good reason to believe they cause allergic diseases.

People come into contact with aluminum every day through food, water, and the air. The amount in vaccines is very much less than what we get from other sources. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia emphasizes that the small amount of aluminum in vaccines is not harmful to our health.

A new study authored in part by Peter McCullough claims that COVID vaccines are linked to a much higher number of dangerous brain blood clots compared to flu shots and other vaccines, especially in women.

The study called “COVID-19 Vaccines: A Risk Factor for Cerebral Thrombotic Syndromes” makes some scary claims about how safe the vaccines are. But the way the study was done has serious problems that make its results unreliable.

One big problem lies in how the study uses information from VAERS, a system where people can report health problems that happen after getting a vaccine. VAERS stands for Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and it’s managed by two government agencies: the CDC and the FDA .

However, VAERS is open to anyone, which means anyone can report a health issue after a vaccine, even if the vaccine didn’t actually cause the problem. For example, if someone got a vaccine and then got a headache the next day, they could report it to VAERS, even though the headache might have had nothing to do with the shot. The VAERS website even warns that these reports don’t prove the vaccine was the cause.

Because of this, using VAERS as the main source for a scientific study can lead to false conclusions. Just because two things happen around the same time doesn’t mean one caused the other.

The website’s most important warning puts the above claims into context: “VAERS reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Reports to VAERS can also be biased. As a result, there are limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.”

The study also uses something called Proportional Reporting Ratios (PRRs) the wrong way. PRRs are a kind of math comparison. They look at how often a specific side effect is reported for one vaccine compared to another, based on reports sent to systems like VAERS.

In this study, the authors calculated really high PRRs—like 1120 for COVID-19 vaccines compared to flu vaccines—and said this shows the COVID-19 vaccines are much more dangerous.

But that’s not how PRRs work. PRRs do not tell us how often something actually happens in real life. They only look at what’s been reported, and reporting can vary a lot depending on how much attention a vaccine is getting in the news or online.

Because of these limitations, PRRs shouldn’t be used to say that one vaccine is riskier than another. It’s like measuring how scary two movies are by counting how many people posted about being scared without knowing how many actually watched each movie.

Following last week’s Senate Oversight Committee hearing, anti-vaxxers claim that vaccines on the childhood schedule were never tested in real science experiments using a true placebo, but instead were only compared to older vaccines or had no real comparison at all.

The claim that most childhood vaccine trials use other vaccines as controls, which are immunologically active and not inert placebos. In reality, saline-placebo-controlled trials are conducted for many vaccines to assess both safety and efficacy:

• Rubella vaccine
• Pneumococcal vaccine
• Hib vaccines
• HPV vaccine
• The Salk Polio vaccine
• Measles vaccine
• Tdap vaccine
• COVID vaccine

It is true that sometimes a new vaccine is tested against an existing vaccine, or a placebo may contain an adjuvant, buffers, or stabilizers with a known safety record.

The World Health Organization guides the ethical use of placebos in vaccine trials in certain situations. It is acceptable when no effective vaccine is available and the new vaccine is intended to benefit the population being studied.

However, using placebos is considered unacceptable when there is already an effective and safe vaccine accessible in the public health system of the country where the trial is planned. In such cases, it would be unethical to withhold the existing vaccine from participants if not receiving it would pose a significant risk to their health.

An example would be like Prevnar-13 and how it was licensed based on a trial comparing it to Prevnar-7, which was already effective in preventing certain diseases caused by pneumococci.

It would have been unethical to use a saline placebo for Prevnar-13 when a vaccine was already available that provided significant protection against severe bacterial infection. Purposely leaving children at risk, without their knowledge, when an approved vaccine with a known safety record was available would have meant purposely allowing children to get sick and worse.

Furthermore, the CDC’s definition of placebo is consistent with the accepted scientific understanding of placebos in vaccine trials. Inert placebos, such as saline solution, are commonly used, but in some cases, an active control, such as another vaccine, may be used to protect participants’ health.

It may be difficult to convince an ardently anti-vaccine person of the value of non-saline placebos because they enter the conversation already believing that vaccines writ large are dangerous.