In moves that should shock no one, the anti-vaccine Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., continues to act on his anti-vaccine shtick.
He has banned vaccines using the preservative thimerosal, which is used in only a small percentage of childhood vaccines in the United States. The danger of thimerosal is a rumor that just won’t die. When Kennedy first formed his anti-vaccine group now called the Children’s Health Foundation, it was called the World Mercury Project, because thimerosal includes mercury the way table salt includes chlorine—i.e., in a compound, not as a free metal.
Kennedy has recently denounced a large Danish study that sought to identify the effect of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and found that there was no statistically significant risk from increased aluminum exposure during childhood. (We’re talking about only a few milligrams total, here.) Kennedy accused the study designers of ignoring data, while cherry picking precisely one example of a condition that was statistically positively associated with aluminum adjuvant exposure, and playing up the significance of this one statistic. (If you run a large number of statistical tests involving small numbers, as the case for this condition, you are bound to get false positives. The uncertainty for the figure is so high that it barely crosses the level of statistical significance.)
