Latest news with #Hviid
Time of India
6 days ago
- Health
- Time of India
Medical journal rejects Kennedy's call for retraction of vaccine study
London: An influential U.S. medical journal is rejecting a call from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal's editor told Reuters. Kennedy has long promoted doubts about vaccines' safety and efficacy, and as health secretary has upended the federal government's process for recommending immunization. A recent media report said he has been considering whether to initiate a review of shots that contain aluminum, which he says are linked to autoimmune diseases and allergies. The study, which was funded by the Danish government and published in July in the Annals of Internal Medicine , analyzed nationwide registry data for more than 1.2 million children over more than two decades. It did not find evidence that exposure to aluminum in vaccines had caused an increased risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders. The work is by far the best available evidence on the question of the safety of aluminum in vaccines, said Adam Finn, a childhood vaccination expert in the UK and pediatrician at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study. "It's solid, (a) massive dataset and high-quality data," he said. Kennedy described the research as "a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry," and said the scientists who authored it had "meticulously designed it not to find harm" in a detailed Aug. 1 opinion piece on TrialSite News, an independent website focused on clinical research. He called on the journal to "immediately retract" the study. "I see no reason for retraction," Dr. Christine Laine, editor in chief of the Annals and a professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University, said in an interview. The journal plans to respond to criticism the article has received on its website, Laine said, but it does not intend to respond directly to Kennedy's piece, which was not submitted to the Annals. The lead author of the study, Anders Peter Hviid, head of the epidemiology research department at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, defended the work in a response post to TrialSite. He wrote that none of the critiques put forward by Kennedy were substantive and he categorically denied any deceit as implied by the secretary. "I am used to controversy around vaccine safety studies - especially those that relate to autism, but I have not been targeted by a political figurehead in this way before," Hviid said in an emailed response to Reuters. "I have confidence in our work and in our ability to reply to the critiques of our study." Kennedy had a number of critiques, including the lack of a control group, that the study deliberately excluded different groups of children to avoid showing a link between aluminum and childhood health conditions - including those with the highest levels of exposure - and that it did not include the raw data. Hviid responded to the criticisms on TrialSite. He said some of the points were related to study design choices that were reasonable to discuss but refuted others, including that the study was designed not to find a link. In fact he said, its design was based on a study led by Matthew Daley, a pediatrician at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, which did show a link, and which Kennedy cited in his article. There was no control group because in Denmark, only 2% of children are unvaccinated, which is too small for meaningful comparison, Hviid added. The data is available for researchers to analyze, but individual-level data is not released under Danish law, he said. Other prominent vaccine skeptics including those at the antivaccine organization Kennedy previously ran, Children's Health Defense, have similarly criticized the study on the Annals site. TrialSite staff defended the study for its scale, data transparency and funding while acknowledging the limitations of its design, a view seconded by some outside scientists. Laine said that while some of the issues Kennedy raised in his article may underscore acceptable limitations of the study, "they do not invalidate what they found, and there's no evidence of scientific misconduct."
NBC News
14-07-2025
- Health
- NBC News
Study finds no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism, asthma
Aluminum in childhood vaccines is a target of vaccine skeptics, who blame the ingredient on myriad health concerns. But a study of more than 1 million people, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found no link between aluminum in vaccines and an increased risk of 50 chronic conditions, including autoimmune diseases, allergies and autism. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread vaccine misinformation for years, said on a podcast in 2024 that aluminum in vaccines is 'extremely neurotoxic.' (An HHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.) Senior study author Anders Hviid said that, as a parent, he understood the concerns about vaccine safety. 'Our study addresses many of these concerns and provides clear and robust evidence for the safety of childhood vaccines. This is evidence that parents need to make the best choices for the health of their children,' said Hviid, who is a professor and the head of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institut, a sector of the Danish Ministry of Health focused on combating and preventing infectious diseases. Hviid and his team used Denmark's nationwide registry to look for any connections between aluminum exposure from childhood vaccines and 50 chronic disorders, including 36 autoimmune disorders, nine allergy or asthma conditions, and five neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and ADHD. The study looked at more than 1.2 million people born in Denmark from 1997 through 2018 and followed them until the end of 2020. Because health records in Denmark are meticulously kept by government agencies, the researchers were also able to compare children who received more aluminum in their vaccines by age 2 compared those who received less. The study didn't include unvaccinated children. The researchers found no link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and any of the 50 conditions. Ross Kedl, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said Scandinavian public health studies are of uniquely good quality. '[This excellence is] partly because they have, for a long time, had such a unified health system,' said Kedl, who wasn't involved with the new study. '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?'' Hviid said the catalyst for the Danish study was a widely criticized Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded study, published in 2022, that suggested a link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and increased asthma risk. The study, however, didn't distinguish between aluminum from vaccines and aluminum from other sources. It also contained inconsistencies: for example, in one group the researchers analyzed, more aluminum exposure wasn't linked to increased asthma risk, contrary to the study's conclusions. '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,' said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The CDC study was not able to do that, Offit said. Aluminum is the third-most abundant metal on Earth and people are exposed to the metal through breast milk, air and water, he said. 'Aluminum is part of our daily diet and has been since the beginning of time. That is the point people don't understand,' said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Neither Osterholm nor Offit were involved with the new study. CDC officials said at the time that it appears that aluminum-containing vaccines 'do not account for the overall trends that we see.' Osterholm said the strength of the broader research is that it piles on dozens of studies that have drawn the same conclusion as the new study. 'One study does not make for a safe vaccine supply or not,' he said. 'It's the accumulative data that comes from many studies that have been done, that together demonstrate the safety of vaccines.' Why is aluminum in vaccines? Different ingredients are added to vaccines for different reasons. Aluminum — added to vaccines as aluminum salts — is what's known as an adjuvant. These additives act as a beacon for the immune system, pointing out invaders and prompting the body to produce antibodies against an antigen, or the virus or bacteria a vaccine aims to protect against. 'You can't just have an antigen and have an immune response, you need some kind of stimulus to trigger that response,' said Kedl, of the University of Colorado. 'An adjuvant is a substance that alerts the body's immune response to the vaccine's antigen. 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 the vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP) as well as vaccines for pneumonia, HPV and hepatitis B. '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.' Aluminum salts from vaccines are injected into the muscle and most are cleared away by the body and filtered out through the kidneys within two weeks, though small amounts can linger for years. 'The aluminum-containing vaccines form the backbone of our childhood immunization programs,' Hviid said, adding that there are currently no viable replacements. 'It is critically important that we keep politics and science apart in this issue. If not, it is the children, including U.S. children, who are going to suffer the consequences.'
New York Times
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Quiet Ones' Review: Getting Swindled in Copenhagen
The Danish heist thriller 'The Quiet Ones' centers on a big score that involves using garbage trucks to block the major roads in Copenhagen to buy the thieves enough time to raid a cash-handling firm. The many moving parts get the better of the filmmakers. The director, Frederik Louis Hviid, opens the movie with a display of self-defeating virtuosity: a robbery filmed in a single take entirely from the inside of an armored van. (That vantage point stops making sense once the drivers exit the vehicle, but Hviid doesn't seem like the kind of filmmaker to cut away from a showboating shot for the sake of narrative logic.) One year later, Slimani (Reda Kateb), the man responsible for the van robbery, recruits Kasper (Gustav Giese) to game out the break-in at the cash-handling firm. Kasper is a family man and a boxer, and his competitive streak inspires him to maximize the take. Slimani is a hardened criminal made less menacing by Kateb's faltering rhythms in English, the gang's lingua franca. The bulk of 'The Quiet Ones' is set in 2008, occasioning a lot of dubiously relevant references to the financial crisis. The heist takes up more than 20 minutes of screen time, but Hviid — who has to juggle the robbers at the firm, the garbage truck drivers, the police and a security guard (Amanda Collin) — makes a hash of the competing perspectives. The road-blocking gambit is barely shown, and Collin's character, fleshed out specifically for this moment, is forgotten for much of the sequence. The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark's history. It deserved a sleeker film. The Quiet OnesNot rated. In Danish, English and Swedish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.
