Current vs. Proposed Pediatric Schedule Moves the Needle on Aluminum. Outlaw Aluminum in One Vaccine, Adopt the New Schedule, and We Reduce Aluminum Chronic Exposure by 78%

Right now, parents and guardians who choose one vaccine over another can reduce chronic aluminum exposure by 37%. If they make the right choice under the proposed schedule, that reduction is 78%.

Animal studies demonstrate that aluminum hydroxide - the same form found in pediatric vaccines - causes autoimmunity, asthma and allergic rhinitis. This is true for studies that use massive or, corrected per body weight, doses that overlap early-life exposure in human patients on the CDC’s schedule. These studies were not conducted to prove that aluminum causes autoimmunity: they were done to provide animal models so pharma can study their drugs for aluminum-caused conditions.

When a vaccine schedule is trimmed, the reflex question is “how many shots came off the list?” It is also the wrong question — at least if what you care about is aluminum.

The proposed revision to the CDC childhood schedule removes universal hepatitis B (including the birth dose), drops hepatitis A, cuts HPV from two doses to one, and downgrades several others to shared clinical decision-making. Count the aluminum-containing doses and you get a tidy 24% reduction in total injected aluminum across the first two years. Tidy — and nearly meaningless. A developing body does not experience a two-year sum. It experiences a curve.

This is the proposed scheduled as provided by Sharyl Attkisson on X (Thank you, Sharyl!):

Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️‍♂️💼🥋@SharylAttkisson

Shhh: Here's CDC's Now-Removed, Revised Vaccine Schedule 🤫 More here: open.substack.com/pub/sharylattk…

8:04 PM · Jul 6, 2026 · 18K Views

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We will now see the difference between higher and lower early-life exposure to aluminum in vaccines doses.

The measure that matters is area, not dose count

To compare the proposed and existing schedules, I ran the current and the proposed schedules through the same retention model our tools use: Priest’s long-retention kernel with dose superposition, scored against the FDA per-dose aluminum ceiling of 850 µg (21 CFR 610.15) scaled to a child’s body weight by the Clark Rule, following Lyons-Weiler & Ricketson (2018). Every aluminum dose deposits a bolus the body clears quickly at first and then holds for a long time; each new dose stacks on the residue of the last. The output is a jagged curve of modeled body burden rising and falling against a limit line that itself climbs as the child grows.

The single most informative number on that chart is not the dose count and not the total micrograms. It is the exceedance area — the modeled body burden that sits above the weight-adjusted limit, integrated across every day of the first two years. It captures both how far over the line a child goes and for how long. Magnitude and duration, in one figure. It is the measure a dose tally cannot see.

Figure 1. Anatomy of the aluminum body-burden chart. Exceedance area (5) is the sum of the areas under the curves. See IPAK studies for more examples.

By that measure, the proposal does far more than the headcount implies. Exceedance area falls 45% — from about 92,200 to 50,600 µg·days. The peak drops from 15.8× to 12.4× the weight-adjusted limit. And the neonatal spike vanishes: the birth-dose hepatitis B puts 250 µg into a roughly 3.3-kg newborn whose weight-scaled ceiling is about 47 µg. Remove it, and the first and sharpest overshoot — the one landing on the lightest, least-buffered body in the whole schedule — goes to zero.

Figure 2. Modeled aluminum body burden over the first 24 months for the current (baseline, gold) and proposed (teal) schedules, against the weight-adjusted FDA limit (dashed). Shaded regions are exceedance — burden above the limit. The proposed schedule removes the birth-dose spike and cuts the integrated exceedance area by 45%. Priest long-retention model; 850 µg (21 CFR 610.15) scaled by Clark’s Rule (Lyons-Weiler & Ricketson 2018); male 50th-percentile weight; Hib as PedvaxHIB (225 µg).

That is the finding the dose count buries. The proposal’s benefit is concentrated exactly where a newborn is least able to dilute an aluminum load: the first days of life.

Figure 3. Neonatal window (first four months). The birth-dose hepatitis B produces a ~250 µg spike onto a newborn whose weight-adjusted limit is ~47 µg (baseline, gold); the proposed schedule eliminates it (teal).

Policy Moves the Needle

Here is where Popperian discipline earns its keep, because the same model refuses to support an overstated case.

Count the days a modeled child spends above the limit and the two schedules are almost identical: 675 of 730 under the current schedule, 662 under the proposed. About 91% of the first two years either way. The proposal cuts the severity of aluminum exceedance without meaningfully changing its ubiquity.

Why? Because the doses that stay universal — DTaP, pneumococcal conjugate, and Hib — are the largest and most-repeated aluminum sources in the infant schedule, and they set the floor. You can strike the birth dose and both hepatitis A doses and still leave a child above the weight-adjusted limit nearly every day, because the retained aluminum from the doses that remain never fully clears before the next arrives. That is what superposition means, and it is precisely why “how many doses” is the wrong lens.

So the honest framing is neither of the two you will hear shouted. This proposal does not “solve” the aluminum question — it cannot, while the biggest sources stay universal. But it is not cosmetic either: a 45% cut in integrated over-limit exposure and the elimination of the neonatal spike are real, and they matter most for the youngest.

We do not yet know how much reduction in aluminum-related autoimmunity and conditions like asthma will occur under the as-yet-proposed schedule. I’m concerned the schedule changes do not go far enough.

The Hib Vaccine Option Smashes the Clock

Not all Hib vaccines contain aluminum. PedvaxHIB, a PRP-OMP conjugate, carries about 225 µg of aluminum per dose. ActHIB and Hiberix, both PRP-T conjugates, carry none. Same disease, same schedule slots, same protection — different adjuvant chemistry.

Running the full two-by-two shows the difference: current versus proposed schedule, each with an aluminum-containing versus an aluminum-free Hib, all on the default retention model, scored as exceedance area — µg·days of modeled burden above the weight-adjusted limit.

Figure 4. Integrated exceedance area (µg·days above the weight-adjusted FDA limit) for the four scenarios, Long/default retention model, first 24 months.

Read the middle two rows together, because that is the finding. Switching the Hib product alone — on the current schedule, with no policy change whatsoever — cuts integrated over-limit aluminum by 37%. And it lands the child (58,083) essentially where the entire proposed schedule lands them with an aluminum-containing Hib (50,557). One line on a purchasing formulary delivers roughly the same aluminum benefit as removing universal hepatitis B and hepatitis A from the childhood schedule — the lever that needs no committee vote nearly equals the one that does.

The two stack, and only together do they change the picture qualitatively. Proposed schedule plus an aluminum-free Hib is the single scenario where the burden finally falls below the limit on whole stretches — days-over-limit drops from 675 to 426, and the peak falls under 10× for the first time (9.5×), a 78% cut in exceedance overall. Policy change alone is predicted to barely touches how often a child is over the line; the Hib swap addition is what allows that policy change to do real work.

The debate fixates on the schedule and ignores the adjuvant sitting on the same shelf. On the measure that matters, product selection is roughly co-equal with schedule policy — and a clinician can act on it today.

Switch the modeled child from PedvaxHIB to a PRP-T Hib and the proposed schedule’s exceedance area falls again, from about 50,600 to 20,100 µg·days — and this time the days-over-limit finally moves too, from 662 to 426. One product choice at the point of care does more to reduce a child’s integrated aluminum exposure than the entire hepatitis B and hepatitis A policy change combined.

The point should not be missed that the largest modifiable aluminum lever in the infant schedule may not be a policy fight in Atlanta at all. It may be a line on a purchasing formulary and a conversation a clinician is free to have today — under the existing schedule, with even more massive pay-off if the new proposed schedule is adopted.

What reform should actually optimize

If we are going to revise pediatric schedules, we should state plainly what we are optimizing and then measure it overtly. Dose counts and total-microgram tallies are the easy numbers, and they mislead. The exposure a developing body actually integrates — magnitude times duration, scaled to the child’s weight, day by day — is the number that should drive design. It is also the number that exposes product-level choices, like the Hib conjugate, that no schedule table currently makes visible.

The model is fully specified and falsifiable: the model is based on peer-reviewed work (McFarland et al., 2020), representative per-dose aluminum values, male 50th-percentile growth, the FDA ceiling scaled by Clark’s Rule. Change any assumption and the curve changes — which is the whole point. Put the assumptions on the table, let anyone run a schedule for themselves, and argue about the numbers instead of the slogans and hyped-up fear mongering.

We are building an educational and research tool that anyone will be able to use, for a small fee, to model aluminum clearance for hypothetical patients.

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References

Lyons-Weiler J, Ricketson R. Reconsideration of the immunotherapeutic pediatric safe dose levels of aluminum. J Trace Elem Med Biol. 2018;48:67–73. doi:10.1016/j.jtemb.2018.02.025

Priest ND. The biological behaviour and bioavailability of aluminium in man. J Environ Monit. 2004;6:375–403. doi:10.1039/b314329p

McFarland G, La Joie E, Thomas P, Lyons-Weiler J. Acute exposure and chronic retention of aluminum in three vaccine schedules and effects of genetic and environmental variation. J Trace Elem Med Biol. 2020;58:126444. doi:10.1016/j.jtemb.2019.126444

U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Aluminum in biological products. 21 CFR 610.15(a).

Modeled figures are not a prediction for any individual child, and not medical advice.

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