Admittedly, this study does show a positive association between aluminum in vaccines given before the age of two was found and developing childhood asthma between the ages of 2 of 5. However, it is a retrospective study that generally cannot establish a causal relationship between a risk factor (aluminum in vaccines) and an observed outcome (asthma). You can’t assume, based on this study, that vaccines caused the observed asthma.

Retrospective studies look back on data collected before the study was designed. Data that would have the potential to impact the observed outcome may not have been collected as it would have in a prospective study.

Let’s consider a few items concerning the results of this study.  Young children have many opportunities for aluminum exposure. Aluminum is the third most abundant element on earth and is present in many of the foods we eat, in much higher quantities than found in vaccines. Any aluminum injected from vaccines is metabolized in the body, and the vast majority of it is excreted within weeks.

Retrospective studies are very good at finding associations that need further exploration and testing. Now that a positive correlation has aluminum and asthma has been identified, further studies with different study designs need to be conducted to determine what may actually be causing the increase in asthma. No study at this point, including this one, has suggested that vaccines are the cause of increases in childhood asthma rates.

This study does show that the CDC takes vaccine safety very seriously and that our monitoring systems work.

These claims were not published in peer-reviewed journals. If they had been peer reviewed, the reviewers would have flagged their interesting take on calculating vaccine effectiveness in preventing death. They begin their calculation with the premise of the “‘healthy vaccinee’ bias,” or the idea that “People who are not vaccinated are, on average, less healthy than their vaccinated counterparts, and therefore have higher mortality in general.” Contrary to this assumption, people with underlying health conditions are usually targeted to receive vaccines first.

It’s also of note that unvaccinated people somehow managed to experience the majority of those deaths during the peaks of COVID activity, as seen here.

Another mistaken assumption is thinking that all the deaths they see are because of the vaccine since they assume that only healthy people are getting vaccinated. But COVID itself contributed to the increase in all causes of death since it can cause damage even after the initial sickness, leading to deaths from heart attacks and strokes.