Pharma's Last Stand

Houston we have a problem!

Scientists who are truly working in the field of vaccine safety are under attack like never before. Hallelujah to that since it is testimony to the importance and quality of their work.

Just under a year ago I wrote a substack entitled Circling The Wagons in which I described how the international aluminium industry and associated industries such as Pharma were doing everything in their collective powers to prepare for the approaching Armageddon.

Never before have so many of the establishment been recruited to defend the hegemony of allopathic medicine the leading example of which being vaccination.

The latest example has just been published in the BMJ. Those of us working in vaccine safety have known about the imminent arrival of this paper for some time and one of us, Dr Guillemette Crepeaux, was at least offered the opportunity to review the manuscript as part of the so-called peer review process. You can read Dr Crepeaux’s informed review of the original manuscript here. Dr Crepeaux recommended that the manuscript should be REJECTED.

So much for peer review.

Papers published in the BMJ may be commented upon using an online system called Rapid Response.

I decided to submit a somewhat tongue-in-cheek rapid response to the publication of the paper. I am copying my Rapid Response below.

MY RR

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

I have been addressing the problem of human exposure to aluminium for over four decades. The specific subject of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines has been my concern for the past twenty years. I am always interested to learn of new research in this field. Congratulations are due to the BMJ for publishing research on aluminium adjuvants in human vaccination. Not all journals are as open to the subject.

However, the new paper by Doyon-Plourde et alia has not adequately addressed never mind solved ‘a problem like Maria’. When I look at the author list, I wonder how they thought that they might contribute to the subject of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines. They set out to review previous research, essentially clinical studies, in the field without anyone in their team with even the barest knowledge of any aspect of aluminium adjuvants. The authors are completely incapable of critically examining anything concerning the chemistry, biology, bioinorganic chemistry, biochemistry et cetera of aluminium in any of the published science included or indeed excluded from their analysis. I use the term ‘analysis’ purposely since what is produced in the paper is, at best, a numerical assay. It has no empirical understanding of the subject matter presumably originally stated in their null hypothesis, namely the benign nature of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines.

Since these authors never stood a chance of solving a problem like Maria one has to wonder as to their motivation for taking on such an important subject in human health. I can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume curiosity to be their driving force. However, their employers, Health Canada, is an established propagandist for human vaccination and so one is left with a certain bad taste in one’s mouth in attempting to swallow any other conclusion than that this research was carried out for the sole purpose of supporting human vaccination using aluminium adjuvants. I hope that the authors can convince me otherwise.

Let me be clear at this point that I am not suggesting that an authorship better informed on the subject of aluminium adjuvants would have solved a problem like Maria. However, they would have produced a better-balanced set of conclusions with clear indications as to which studies carry weight, and ought to be included in their analysis, and which studies are clearly fraught with errors and fundamentally flawed and consequently should be excluded.

There is a clear conclusion that should be accepted by all concerned parties and this is that the science remains equivocal as to safety of human vaccines that include an aluminium adjuvant. However, the science on the toxicity of aluminium in humans is unequivocal. Many decades of peer-reviewed published research have documented the myriad health effects of human exposure to aluminium. Aluminium is only toxic in all biota and this alone should be a red flag as to its continued use in human vaccination. If nothing else, it should be appreciated by all concerned that the efficacy of aluminium adjuvants in producing an immune reaction lies in its direct toxicity at the injection site.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0946672X19304201?via%3Dihub

END OF MY RR

Rapid Responses are, today, limited to just 600 words and so one cannot use this medium to re-review a published paper.

However, bearing in mind that Dr Crepeaux’s original review of the unpublished manuscript was completely ignored by both the BMJ and the authors of the paper, Dr Crepeaux also submitted a Rapid Response, a summary of why the manuscript should not have been published.

I am copying Dr Crepeaux’s Rapid Response below.

DR CREPEAUX’S RR

The published article presents itself as a rigorous systematic review of the available human data regarding Aluminum-Based Adjuvants (ABAs). Following peer review in which I personally recommended rejection, some overly affirmative statements were softened and the authors more openly acknowledged methodological limitations and the need for further research. Nevertheless, the overall framing of the paper remains strongly biased and raises important scientific and public health concerns.

The main limitation of this review lies in its deliberately restricted scope. The authors excluded:

- animal studies,

- mechanistic data,

- toxicokinetic and biodistribution studies,

- cellular studies,

- much of the contemporary experimental literature on injected ABA particles.

Yet modern toxicology cannot seriously assess chronic risk without integrating biological mechanisms. By restricting the analysis almost exclusively to observational human studies, the review excludes precisely the fields in which the most concerning signals emerge:

- biopersistence,

- neuroinflammation,

- macrophagic transport,

- developmental toxicology,

- neuro-immune mechanisms.

This omission is especially problematic regarding perinatal exposure and early neurodevelopment. The paper provides virtually no discussion of in utero exposure, injections during infancy, or repeated exposure during critical developmental windows.

The authors then conclude that no obvious large-scale safety signal emerges from the available human data. However, this essentially amounts to searching under the streetlight: one only finds what one actively looks for. Studies specifically designed to detect rare, delayed, neuro-immune, or developmental effects of ABAs have almost never been conducted.

Importantly, the authors themselves acknowledge:

- absence of robust long-term longitudinal studies,

- poor quality of many datasets,

- limitations of observational cohorts,

- need for further mechanistic and epidemiological research.

One cannot simultaneously admit that the appropriate studies have never truly been performed while continuing to invoke a “long-established safety profile” as though it were definitively established scientific fact.

The section devoted to Macrophagic MyoFasciitis (MMF) illustrates this contradiction particularly well. The authors acknowledge:

- Al-containing lesions at injection sites,

- persistence of lesions for months or years,

- systemic symptoms among biopsied patients, including chronic fatigue, myalgia, arthralgia, muscle weakness, and cognitive impairment.

Yet they conclude that current evidence does not support a causal association between MMF lesions and systemic symptoms. This conclusion is highly debatable. More than twenty years of clinical literature describe a relatively coherent syndrome associating chronic pain, profound fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, functional neuroimaging abnormalities, and Al-containing histological lesions. MMF has therefore not been described as a harmless “vaccine tattoo,” but rather as an immunologically active lesion associated with a chronic neuro-immune syndrome. Importantly, these patients are often severely disabled; approximately 96% of members of the French patient association are considered disabled, with nearly three quarters classified as totally disabled.

The authors repeatedly emphasize the absence of definitive causal proof while largely ignoring a central issue: almost no prospective study has ever been specifically designed to investigate the long-term neuro-immune consequences of injected ABAs. Existing epidemiological tools are poorly suited to detect rare, delayed, or multifactorial outcomes.

Absence of strong evidence therefore cannot be equated with evidence of absence.

The repeated reliance on studies such as Mitkus et al. (2011), Andersson et al. (2025), or Moser & Offit (2026) is equally problematic. These studies are repeatedly presented as reassuring despite major published methodological limitations.

Ultimately, this article never demonstrates the absence of risk associated with ABAs. Rather, it demonstrates the absence of adequate studies capable of properly investigating certain rarely documented, delayed, neuro-immune, or developmental outcomes.

In this respect, the paper resembles a classic example of the manufacturing of doubt: emphasizing uncertainty when safety concerns emerge while simultaneously presenting weak or incomplete evidence as sufficiently reassuring. Such an approach may protect institutional narratives, but it ultimately undermines scientific credibility, public health and patient safety.

END OF DR CREPEAUX’S RR

I am sure that you will agree that Dr Crepeaux presents an informed and balanced critique of what is now the published paper.

Those of you reading this substack who have already clicked on the link to the published paper may be asking, well if at least two Rapid Responses have been submitted to the BMJ about this paper, where are they! Why have they not been published?

I think we all know the answer. Pharma’s circling of the wagons is to be Custer’s last stand. Borrowing a phrase from one of my favourite TV shows of the distant past, ‘The Truth is Out There’ (one of my students made a poster of this statement and it remained on my office wall up until the day I was removed), and the truth is coming to a cinema near you in the not too distant future.

Hang on in there. We are!