It seems to me that a lot of these ingredients are victims of dihydrogen monoxide syndrome. Someone who doesn’t quite understand the situation might be alarmed to hear that they are constantly surrounded by a chemical that has the highest pH value of any acid in the world, especially upon learning that you can’t get it off of your hands no matter how much you wash them. They might think themselves rightly worried about a chemical compound made up in part by a highly reactive hydroxyl radical that has been shown to mutate DNA, denature proteins, disrupt cell membranes, and chemically alter critical neurotransmitters. And indeed, the fact that dihydrogen monoxide is the combination of a highly explosive element and one of the most potent catalysts for explosive reactions may lead them to beg for government intervention. But then you tell them that “dihydrogen monoxide” is just another name for “water,” and they will (hopefully) calm down.
Aluminum might seem like an odd ingredient if you’re thinking about aluminum foil or a solid metal ingot, but vaccines don’t have chunks of metal in them. They contain aluminum salts, which boost the immune response of the vaccine’s recipient and prevent different batches of a vaccine from having wildly different levels of effectiveness. As is usually the case in chemistry, the properties of the compound are not just those of its component elements combined. Composition matters. Ethyl alcohol and methyl alcohol contain the exact same elements, for example, though in different amounts and in a different arrangement. One gets you drunk when ingested; the other kills you. Similarly, there’s a big difference between an aluminum salt (such as aluminum phosphate or aluminum hydroxide) and a hunk of solid aluminum. And in any case, infants get more than twice the amount of aluminum from breastfeeding than they do from vaccines.
Formaldehyde, meanwhile, is a classic case of the dose making the poison. While it can be dangerous in large amounts, small amounts are produced naturally in the human body and are easily metabolized. Furthermore, formaldehyde is not actually a direct ingredient of vaccines. As noted here, it is used “to inactivate viruses so that they don’t cause disease (e.g., polio virus used to make polio vaccine) and to detoxify bacterial toxins, such as the toxin used to make diphtheria vaccine. Formaldehyde is diluted during the vaccine manufacturing process, but residual quantities of formaldehyde may be found in some current vaccines. The amount of formaldehyde present in some vaccines is so small compared to the concentration that occurs naturally in the body that it does not pose a safety concern.”
As for chick embryos, there are none in vaccines. If you look closely, you’ll see that what is listed is “chick embryo cell culture.” A cell culture grown in a chick embryo is not the same thing as the embryo itself, though the difference is easy to miss on a quick reading. Because attenuated vaccines contain material from the viruses they are designed to fight, we have to grow that material before we can make the vaccine itself. The chick embryo is the substrate used to grow the virus before it is altered for medical use. Along the same lines, those viruses need something to feed on if they are to survive. That’s where the bovine extract and calf serum come in. At this point, you might be wondering why these things are listed if they are not in the final product. For that I refer you to the first sentence in the linked document: “This table includes not only vaccine ingredients (e.g., adjuvants and preservatives), but also substances used during the manufacturing process, including vaccine-production media, that are removed from the final product and present only in trace quantities.”
This brings us to thimerosal, which is used primarily as a preservative in multi-dose vials of influenza vaccine (which significantly lowers the price of said vaccine). The first thing to note is that the only reason people get worked up about thimerosal is that it has mercury in it. But remember the point I made earlier about chemistry? Well, it turns out that all of the worries about mercury toxicity are based on studies of methyl mercury. But thimerosal does not contain methyl mercury. It contains ethyl mercury, which is much less dangerous and is metabolized far more quickly. Again, composition matters.
So that’s the ingredients, but what about alternative vaccination schedules? As it turns out, there is quite a lot of research supporting the standard schedule. That’s why it’s the standard schedule. It was built on the evidence, and then continued to be studied each time a change was introduced. What has not been researched thoroughly is the effects of alternative schedules. There’s no reason to think that spacing vaccinations further apart will decrease the effectiveness of those vaccinations. The primary risk is that one’s child either catches or spreads one of the diseases they would have otherwise been protected against (possibly dying or killing another child in the process).
My own view is that the choice between “no risk” and “the possible death of one or more children” is not a remotely difficult one to make. But at the end of the day, parents are free to decide for themselves.
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