“How a university, its major funders and a newspaper killed research into the toxicity of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines”
This article appeared on UK Column website, 6th October 2022: https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/how-a-university-its-major-funders-and-a-newspaper-killed-research-into-the-toxicity-of
We extract some of the article here, referring you to the link above for the full article.
by
Thursday, 6th October 2022
This long read was originally published in The Looking Glass, a New Zealand blog.
This is a story about how a British university stifled ground-breaking public interest science, ostensibly to satisfy powerful interests — and save their own bacon.
As far as the general public is concerned, universities, those hallowed halls, remain places where academics can pursue knowledge unhindered. But many universities and higher education institutions are compromised by the interests of their funders and an increasingly narrow and corporate view of science.
Professor Christopher Exley, a lauded biologist, the world’s pre-eminent expert on aluminium and a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology — a recognition few scientists achieve — last year lost research funding for his longstanding work on aluminium toxicity in diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism, and its role as an adjuvant in vaccines.
It took place through a series of politically motivated moves that ultimately ended with his funding being completely cut off.
Aluminium is toxic
If you take the time to listen to one of Exley’s many lectures — and you should — you will learn that aluminium is ubiquitous. It is everywhere in the environment, and it is highly toxic to human beings.
In the 1980s, Exley was doing research into why fish were dying in acidified lakes and rivers; he came to understand they were dying of aluminium toxicity. Aluminium — previously locked up in rocks and clays or recycled in the environment by silicic acid — had, through the process of acidification due to acid rain, become bioavailable and entered into biological life cycles.
Today, we ingest aluminium through processed foods, drink it in water, and cook in aluminium pots and pans (many pans are now made of anodised aluminium). It is found in baby formula, cosmetics and is a key ingredient in many vaccines.
The important public health implications of Exley’s work
A tenured professor at Keele University in Staffordshire for nearly 30 years, with more than 200 papers under his belt, Exley and his team of research scientists had in 2017 established what he describes as an “unequivocal” connection between aluminium toxicity and Alzheimer’s disease.
“Without aluminium, there would be no Alzheimer’s,” he says in his book, Imagine You Are An Aluminium Atom.
A few years later, in 2020, Exley’s group published their seminal paper comparing aluminium content in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and autism in Nature’s Scientific Reports.
The team had developed a protocol to measure the aluminium content of brains, which had shown that the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, autism and multiple sclerosis had elevated levels of aluminium. Importantly, access to the samples from a brain bank used in the research had been funded by charitable donations rather than more traditional funding sources.
Answering questions from The Looking Glass, Exley says that by the time this paper was published the focus of their research had already turned to aluminium adjuvants and vaccines, a field of study they had pursued for many years.
A 2021 paper measured the aluminium content of 13 infant vaccines and compared it with the manufacturer’s data. Only three vaccines contained the amount of aluminium indicated by the manufacturer, while six contained a statistically significant greater quantity, and four a statistically significant lower quantity.
Exley’s work is ground-breaking, and has obvious implications for public health. He and his team were the last research group left in Britain studying the impact of toxic exposure to aluminium, a field of study that just twenty years earlier was active.
Aluminium research quietly suffocated
Exley explains that in the early 1990s, the aluminium industry stepped up its efforts to influence government, charities and various industries to make it increasingly difficult for scientists to obtain funding to do research into aluminium toxicity:
Hence, group [after] group moved their attention from aluminium to other areas where funding was available. I have said this many times, but I did not become a scientist for science’s sake. I took up science to solve the paradox of aluminium and human life.
I was undeterred and worked harder and harder to win research funding from as wide a funding base as possible. I doubt that any scientist has worked as hard as I did in keeping research funding coming to my lab
While Exley had been able to be conclusive about the connection between Alzheimer’s and aluminium toxicity, sadly his work was scuppered before he was able be as conclusive about the link between aluminium toxicity and autism and nor could he continue his work on aluminium in vaccines.
FOR THE FULL ARTICLE AND AN INTERVIEW WITH EXLEY, GO TO https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/how-a-university-its-major-funders-and-a-newspaper-killed-research-into-the-toxicity-of