In December 2019, top-tier members of the global vaccine establishment met at the World Health Organization (WHO) for a now-infamous Global Vaccine Safety Summit. The WHO—the same entity that allows testing of experimental vaccines on children without informed consent—is scrambling to come up with messaging that will convince the public and health professionals to set aside their growing concerns about vaccine safety.

Many people are particularly worried about the safety of vaccine adjuvants—formulations added to vaccines to increase their potency and efficacy. At the December summit, the Coordinator of WHO's Initiative for Vaccine Research candidly conceded that these concerns are justified, acknowledging adjuvants' association with systemic adverse events and stating that vaccines without adjuvants are preferable to vaccines with adjuvants. "We do not add adjuvants to vaccines because we want to do so," this industry insider commented, but because some vaccines will not "work" without them. His conclusion? "If you can avoid using an adjuvant, please do so."

Flying in the face of the WHO Coordinator's words, vaccine manufacturers are headed in the opposite direction, with virologists crowing that adjuvants "have really taken off in the last 10 to 15 years." The overt rationale for the rush to develop and use more adjuvants is that modern synthetic vaccines lack "intrinsic immunostimulatory activity" and need more of a "helping hand" to prod the immune system into action. However, vaccine makers are also giddy at new proprietary adjuvants' potential to launch highly profitable next-generation vaccines. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a major sponsor of adjuvant research, an official states that even a "mediocre" vaccine can be "significantly improved by adding the right adjuvant."

The changing adjuvant landscape

For 70 years, the sole licensed adjuvants were aluminum-based. About 80% of vaccines (including those with a diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis component, hepatitis A and B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, human papillomavirus, meningococcal and pneumococcal) rely on aluminum compounds with variable physical and chemical properties: aluminum phosphate, aluminum hydroxide, potassium aluminum sulfate and Merck's proprietary amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate (AAHS). Studies indicate that the large number of aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines administered to infants (as per the CDC schedule) results in a high degree of chronic aluminum toxicity.