The Director of the Immunization Safety Office at the CDC, Tom Shimabukuro, has asked Israeli health agencies to investigate their vaccine data for a possible link between aluminum and asthma. The potential link was identified in a CDC study that was released in September of 2022. The email was sent to Emilia Anis, the Director of the Division of Epidemiology for the Ministry of Health in Israel. The study was published in May of 2022 and the email was sent in September of last year. No update has been provided on the Ministry of Health findings.

The email was uncovered by the attorneys at ICAN through a Freedom of Information Act request. While the email shows an intent to investigate potential harms of the vaccine, the chain of messages shows a lack of urgency. Anis responded to Shimabukuro and told him the holidays would delay their ability to gather the information. Shimabukuro responded back, “No rush, it’s not super urgent.”

ICAN’s lead counsel Aaron Siri commented, “You could see there is no urgency in the CDC around the findings there. They’re not rushing to look into this issue and it’s very troubling.”

Siri further explained the implications of this perceived relationship between aluminum adjuvants and asthma prevalence. “Aluminum adjuvants are not just aluminum that you might ingest that is often in ionic form. Super super tiny. An ionic piece of aluminum is a pen. An aluminum adjuvant, think of it as an entire city, massive on a nano scale. These things get injected and are there specifically to cause cellular death at the injection site, so you have an immune response. What happens to the aluminum adjuvant, it can’t just be excreted. We know from various studies of animals that the aluminum adjuvant gets deposited in organs all around the body, including the brain, the heart, the lungs. These studies were conducted by the CDC, NIH and other health agencies.”

The study that caused Shimabukuro to contact Israel found a positive association between aluminum adjuvant exposure in vaccines and asthma. The study included two cohorts, those with and those without eczema. The sample size was 326,991 children under two years of age. 14,337 of the children had eczema and the vast majority were in the non-eczema cohort. It was reported that both groups had a positive correlation with aluminum adjuvant exposure before two years of age and asthma prevalence at 24 months to 59 months of age.

The prevalence of asthma has increased alongside the number of vaccines that children receive. A CDC chart shows a gap between 1996 and 2001 where the asthma rates jumped from around 5 percent to around 7 percent. This coincides with the first school mandate for childhood vaccines. Currently, the childhood vaccination schedule includes 16 vaccines to be administered in the first 6 months of a child’s life, many of which contain aluminum adjuvants. That does not include the COVID vaccine or flu shots.

A study published by NIH examined pediatric deaths from asthma from 2003-2015. According to the study, an average of 195 deaths occurred from asthma each year. In the United States, 3,517 people of all ages died from asthma in 2021.

ICAN has submitted additional FOIA requests to obtain more internal dialogue surrounding this study.

Updated Monday, October 30, 2023