Kennedy, Wakefield and the Aluminum Grand Finale: Conversations with the "Aluminum Family": part 1 of 2

This story provides additional background, including interviews with members of the "aluminum family," to supplement our MSNBC Opinion piece out today - RFK Jr. is targeting aluminum in vaccines — and children could pay the price.

On the Northern coast of Jamaica, just West of Montego Bay, the rolling hills are occupied by the Tryall Club - dozens of privately-owned villas that, if you are lucky to find one for rent, go for tens of thousands USD a week. One of the villas, called Twin Palms, was owned for decades by Albert Dwoskin, a Northern Virginia real estate developer, and his young wife, 20 years his junior, Claire Dwoskin. “They travel to Jamaica 5 or 6 times per year with their two children to enjoy the warm, sunny, idyllic setting in the Tryall Club,” said  a travel magazine at the time. 

Back home in Virginia, the Dwoskins were big supporters of Democratic causes, hosting fundraisers for the Clintons at their sprawling riverfront property, a short drive from the heart of DC, and even earning an invitation to a State Dinner at the White House in 2000. 

But after Claire became a mother in 1999, she developed a singular, unusual focus: aluminum. 

“I organized a small conference, inviting about 20 scientists from all over the world, and they presented all their research,” she recalled in a recent podcast. “And the conclusions of the scientists were that aluminum toxicity is linked to so many different conditions. We have been taught that aluminum is benign. But in fact it’s insidiously unsafe.”

The “small conference” Dwoskin is referring to is the 3-day “Vaccine Safety Conference” she organized at the Tryall club in early January, 2011. The Dwoskins rented several villas for the occasion to house the guests comfortably - a separate bedroom for each, as Romain Gherardi, a French neuropathologist turned aluminum researcher who was at the meeting, describes in his 2016 book, “Toxic Story: Two or Three Embarrassing Truths About Vaccine Adjuvants.”

In attendance were most of the world’s top researchers on toxicity of aluminum, including the field's founder, Christopher Exley, who is often referred to as "Mr. Aluminum." In his recent book, "Discussions with Mr Aluminum" (published by Skyhorse, the publisher of " books other houses consider too controversial to publish," such as Kennedy's books), he coins the term “aluminum family” to describe the group. Christopher Shaw, Lucija Tomljenovic (who now works for Children's Health Defense), Romain Gherardi, Yehuda Shoenfeld and a few others were in attendance. 

But this was no ordinary scientific conference. And not only because of the unusually luxurious setting.

Normally, scientists themselves would organize such conferences and set the agenda and the goals.  But in this meeting, opening remarks were delivered by an anti-vaccine activist, Barbara Loe Fisher, a long-time friend of Dwoskin and the founder of National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) for which Dwoskin was a funder and board member since 2007. In the video of the conference, still on youtube, you can see Dwoskin at the head of the table, then Fisher, then Vicki Debold Pebsworth - Fisher’s long-time friend and NVIC board member (also since 2007), now on ACIP - and then Meryl Nass, an NVIC “Medical Advisor” and an expert in Gulf War Syndrome who played a key role in sparking interest in aluminum (more on this later). 

Also strange for a scientific conference: two lawyers were in attendance. 

And there was Andrew Wakefield, another NVIC “medical advisor” and the disgraced British doctor who was stripped of his UK medical license for experimenting on autistic children. When things went south in his home country, he came to the US in 2001, and low and behold - here he is, giving a talk to other scientists on the “research strategy” for autism. In fact, during the “conference” Wakefield learned that his 1998 Lancet paper was finally retracted - a shocking 13 years later - due to “intentional fraud.” He gave an exclusive interview to Anderson Cooper right from Tryall Club. Little that Cooper new - Wakefield was again discussing “autism strategies” with like-minded colleagues.

It’s clear that Wakefield had a key role in the meeting. Shaw told me that Dwoskin insisted on inviting Wakefield. He is interviewed prominently in the “highlights” video of the meeting. He gave a 40-minute “strategy” talk. Why was he there? Aluminum researchers denied to me that Wakefield conducted any aluminum research himself. But Exley and Shaw both called him a friend and referred to him as “Andy,” and Crepeaux, another member of the “aluminum family,” said she was in recent communication with him.  And Wakefield and Fisher go way back. At a 2002 NVIC conference Fisher organized, soon after Wakefield’s arrival to the US, he gave several presentations and a keynote address. (Wakefield also helped Kennedy pass confirmation hearings in January, as I learned in my lunch with Anthony Mawson. Wakefield’s shadow role supporting Kennedy and Del Bigtree - in a future story.)

Finally, unlike a regular scientific conference, the conclusions of the Jamaica meeting were pre-ordained. Dwoskin was not fully transparent when she described the Jamaica meeting as a revelation to her on the toxicity of aluminum. While she was listening to the talks, a documentary she sponsored called “The Greater Good” was submitted to the Dallas Film Festival, where it premiered 3 months later. (The New York Times called it an “ emotionally manipulative, heavily partial look at the purported link between autism and childhood immunization” - those were the days when such films were still reviewed by the mainstream media). In the film, Shaw voices over a cartoon of a mouse being injected with aluminum, depicted as an ominous white cloud spreading over its body. The mouse starts to swing its head violently side-to-side and dies. A zoom-in of its brain shows the white cloud killing its brain cells. The film was probably a couple of years in the works by the time of the Jamaica meeting, Shaw told me. He was interviewed over a year earlier.

The Fringe Science of Aluminum

This is a story - based on recent interviews with several members of the “aluminum family” and review of archival materials - of a massive effort between 2011 and 2017, largely sponsored by Dwoskin, to produce an entire body of literature - from animal studies to descriptions of human syndromes caused by aluminum-containing vaccines - making aluminum the next target in vaccines after mercury moved to the background.

The interviews offer new insights into how the shift from mercury to aluminum occurred, and why it took so long. They explain the years-long gap between Kennedy’s first mention of aluminum - in his famous 2005 “Deadly Immunity” piece embarrassingly co-published by Rolling Stone and Salon - and his apparent resurgence of interest in aluminum in 2017 that probably led him to rename World Mercury Project into Children’s Health Defense in 2018. And they help us answer the key question in this story - is the “aluminum family” just a group of ordinary scientists doing ordinary research that produced results that helped antivaxxers, and that the “mainstream” scientific community did not want to hear? Or do the scientists themselves hold extreme views?

One clue comes from the literature itself. It is full of holes, short on independent validation and not accepted by the mainstream scientific community - what scientists usually call “fringe.” 

For example, all studies showing that rodents develop neurological dysfunction when injected with aluminum have Shaw as an author. 

Another example: Macrophagic myofasciitis (MMF), a syndrome discovered by Gherardi in a saga he describes in his book. According to Gherardi, MMF is an exceedingly rare condition with vague symptoms that can develop in adults years after receiving an aluminum-containing vaccine. And Gherardi showed that if you biopsy their deltoid - the shoulder muscle where the vaccine was injected years earlier - you do find traces of aluminum. There is only one problem. He never biopsied people without symptoms. His excuse is that this would be unethical. He is clearly wrong. Even sham surgeries have been done in the interest of research. The real reason he did not biopsy healthy individuals is clear: they, too, would likely have traces of aluminum at the site of vaccination. It’s what we call in medicine a “red herring” - a totally irrelevant finding.

Of course, this is not to diminish in any way the symptoms and the suffering of the patients. Gherardi’s research, his book and his activism led to the patients in France forming their own association called E3M. Its website says that the group “does not oppose vaccination in principle, but advocates for the use of aluminum-free vaccines.” In 2013, when the French Ministry of Health refused to fund Gherardi’s work, E3M members went on a hunger strike until the Ministry relented. When I spoke to Crepeaux, Gherardi’s former student, she denied that Gherardi was involved in organizing the strike. But regardless, as a physician, I am not sure that these patients are helped by tying their symptoms to a vaccine they received years earlier. 

Shoenfeld also invented a syndrome. He modestly calls it the Shoenfeld syndrome, or ASIA - Autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants. He was not shy at the Jamaica meeting to say that he invented it for the express purpose to help win antivax lawsuits. 

“How did I come to the story of vaccines,” he said in his talk. “Being an immunologist and doing basic research, I was called by lawyers to defend or support claims for vaccine-induced autoimmune diseases… I saw this as a challenge whether I can convince the lay people… I have gained a lot of experience and appeared in many courts. They wanted me to show that this was a real, well-defined autoimmune disease. If it’s lupus, it should fullfill all 4 of 11 criteria [a requirement to make a lupus diagnosis]. And in many of the cases, I knew that it’s lupus. It was lupus-like disease. So it will be lupus in a year. But if it was 3 of 11, the judge said, listen, it’s not lupus. And if it’s not lupus, you don’t have a case… So this gave me the impetus to [describe] what we called 'ASIA syndrome'.”

Enter Kennedy, Del Bigtree and Trump

While the aluminum research was ongoing, Kennedy was kept in the loop. Shaw said he spoke to Kennedy occasionally starting around 2011. Exley said he knows Kennedy for “almost 10 years,” which would be around 2016. 

2015 is when a new actor enters the scene: Del Bigtree. He was at the time a producer on a daytime CBS show “The Doctors.” “At an event in a backyard in the Hollywood Hills, Del Bigtree met Andrew Wakefield and was, like Jenny McCarthy, Robert DeNiro and model Elle Macpherson who is his current girlfriend, taken in,” according to an online magazine.

Wakefield was in LA pitching a documentary based on secret recordings of a CDC employee made by Brian Hooker, an antivax activist who recruited Wakefield earlier for help making a documentary. They needed a real hollywood producer. Del Bigtree left CBS and joined them. He soon started ICAN, Informed Consent Action Network, which would go on to become one of the most successful antivax nonprofits, earnings tens of millions. 

But big money was not in donations - it was in antivax lawsuits. Repeating Wakefield’s UK playbook, him and Bigtree found not one, but two antivax lawyers - Kennedy and Aaron Siri. 

Wakefield provided the link to Dwoskin’s meeting.  Once enough aluminum publications were accumulated by 2017, reliable or not, Del Bigtree’s ICAN, cited them in a brief warning of the dangers of aluminum filed with the HHS on October 2017. Aaron Siri was the lawyer for ICAN at the time, and Kennedy may have been as well (was definitely by 2018). The brief included letters of support written by senior members of the aluminum family - Shaw, Exley and Gherardi, proclaiming aluminum as the cause of autism. Exley and Gherardi use identical language. Shaw’s is different but the same points are made. 

In my interviews with Exley and Shaw, these letters were not something they were eager to talk about. I understand why - they were shameful misrepresentations of science by researchers on antivaxers’ payroll, reminiscent of Wakefield’s misgivings. Exley told me he first met Del Bigtree, the legal brief’s originator, and Aaron Siri, the lawyer who prepared the brief, in 2018. When I reminded Exley of the letter, he hesitated and said that Shaw was the one who coordinated letter writing by the three. Shaw feined poor memory.

The letters are dated June 2017. A few months earlier, in January, Kennedy met Trump. The media broke the news at the time - “Trump proposes to create a vaccine safety commission headed by Kennedy.” 

But the real topic, unknown to the media, was most likely aluminum, as Kennedy let in during an interview a few months later. In the interview, Kennedy brings up aluminum several times (despite being interrupted by the journalist), and says that Trump sent him to meet with the heads of relevant agencies at the HHS. One of them confirmed to me that indeed aluminum was the topic. Shaw also agreed that this was likely the topic. 

But nothing came of it. It’s no surprise - given the quality of the science, HHS leaders were not interested. 

(Andrew Wakefield met with Trump earlier, in 2015, and gave him a pre-release copy of his documentary, Vaxxed. Also in attendance - Mark Blaxill, an antivaxxer, a self-proclaimed expert in the “autism epidemic,” and a co-author of a paper with Walter Zahorodny, who recently testified alongside Kennedy press conference announcing the “autism epidemic” - more on this in a later story.)

At this point, Kennedy and Trump probably decided to wait until Trump’s second term and a more friendly HHS. 

And the science and medicine establishment? They forgot all about aluminum as a potential antivax target. This was a critical mistake. As a result, most of the literature on aluminum in vaccines now comes from Dwoskin’s financing of the “aluminum family.” These studies now are sprinkled across scientific journals, largely uncontested and un-debunked. They pop up any time you google “aluminum and autism.” 

And now Kennedy is in charge of HHS, poised to deal aluminum-containing vaccines a decisive blow by “discovering” aluminum as the cause of the “autism epidemic” in a massive HHS study conducted, fully or in part, behind closed doors.

“Capacity to Excrete Metals”

On April 30, 2025, Kennedy was a guest on Dr Phil’s talk show. They turned to the subject of what Kennedy called an “autism epidemic” and what may be causing it (in fact, there is no epidemic - more on this in another story. To be reminded how tragically wrong Kennedy is when he says that there was no autism in 1960s, just google “willowbrook.”). Kennedy said,

“Well, whatever’s causing the epidemic is not genetic, as I said. You know, people who smoke cigarettes, one out of every four to five died of lung cancer or got lung cancer. That means there was four of those five who didn’t. So they were okay. So you’d say, is it genes that are causing the epidemic of lung cancer? No, it’s not. It’s an environmental exposure. And that environmental exposure disproportionately impacts people with different genetic makeups.

And we know a lot about the genes among autism kids. We know about some of the genetic differences, that there tends to be less glutathione production, there tends to be higher testosterone, there tends to be less of a capacity to excrete metals. And many, many of them, in one case, 100%. In one study, 100% of the kids had mitochondrial disorders. And that indicates that the cause could be an accumulation of materials in our environment that are affecting mitochondrial function and that the kids who already are in the race with low mitochondrial function, metabolic dysfunction are the ones who are the ones who get hurt.

…I mean, a couple things we know is that we know that it’s a toxin that became widespread around 1989 because Congress asked EPA, what year did the autism epidemic begin? And the EPA scientists came back and said, it’s a red line. 1989. So something happened in 1989, some toxic exposure that affected every demographic in our country, from Cubans in Key Biscayne to Inuit in Homer, Alaska. And we also know that it impacted boys at a 4 to 1 ratio to girls.

You need to find a toxin that became pervasive around 1989, and that has that sexual dimorphism in its impacts.”

Incidentally, the EPA study Kennedy is referring to was described eloquently by Andrew Wakefield in the Jamaica meeting. 

On June 4, as I was relistening to this podcast for the second time, it suddenly hit me - metals… metals… what metal could he be talking about? 

Dwoskin meets Fisher

“I struggled to have my children, and I was so blessed to be lucky enough to have my twins, a boy and a girl,”  says Dwoskin.  

“When I first took our twins for their 2-month pediatrician visit, they were given a vaccine that then at 4 months had already been taken off the market because of safety concerns. And I wondered, how could a vaccine be given one month and not the next - it made me question, how rigorous was the safety? But then I continued to vaccinate my children. My son developed speech and language problems, motor skill problems. So we were in the therapy offices. And I saw so many kids who were struggling and could not live their lives in a fulfilled way, and how it was affecting the parents… 

“I began looking into the safety of vaccines, and I probably did five years of reading, talking to others, going to conferences, FDA meetings and Institute of Medicine meetings, and learning. And then I realized that I can make a bigger contribution by starting to fund some science.”

This quest led Dwoskin in 2006 to meet Barbara Loe Fisher, the founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), the oldest existing anti-vaccine organization in the US, founded in 1982. 

The DTP vaccine: public health triumph, but at a cost

Fisher started her activism against one specific enemy: the DTP vaccine, and particularly the “P” - the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. 

According to the NVIC website, Fisher “graduated from the University of Maryland with a B.A. in English and was a writer and community relations professional at a teaching hospital before becoming a mother in 1978. She has three grown children and a grandson. Her oldest son suffered a convulsion, collapse and brain inflammation within hours of his fourth DPT shot in 1980 when he was two and a half years old. He was left with multiple learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder and was confined to a special education classroom throughout his public school education.”

The pertussis vaccine was an incredible public health breakthrough. In a heart-wrenching video from a lecture on pertussis at the NIH, at about 9 minutes in, you can see a 7-week old infant having a bout of whooping cough in a scene from a documentary shown by the lecturer, Dr Alexandra Freeman. "He was due to be vaccinated against whooping cough in the next week," says the narrator. "But the germs got to him first." "What is really hard about this is that there is no great therapy when you are like this," says Freeman. Antibiotics don't help the patient, because it's not the bacteria, but the toxin they release, that damages the lungs.

In 1940s, the pertussis vaccine was combined with tetanus and diphtheria, to make DTP, highly effective against three dangerous diseases.

But DTP did have side effects. Fisher’s concerns were not unjustified. According to a historical review, 

DTP vaccines were very reactogenic and concern regarding DTP safety grew in the 1970s and 1980s. A high proportion of infants experienced significant injection site reactions following DTP immunization (redness [37%], swelling [41%], and pain [51%]).

Fever occurred within hours after DTP in many infants: 47% of infants had temperatures > 38 C and 6% had temperatures > 39C. DTP vaccines were also associated with serious systemic reactions, including febrile seizures, hypotonic hyporesponsive episodes (temporary shock-like state), persistent crying and whole limb swelling. Although none were associated with serious long-term sequelae, these adverse events contributed to increasing public concerns about the safety of the vaccine. Especially concerning was the suggestion that some serious cases of encephalopathy were attributable to DTP; these were referred to as “pertussis vaccine encephalopathy.” Studies ultimately detected no true association between DTP and encephalopathy.

Nonetheless, reservations about DTP safety, and to lesser extent, the effectiveness of selected vaccines, had global impact. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japan suspended their pertussis vaccination program because of safety concerns. In Sweden, effectiveness  concerns  led  to  a  suspension  of  Sweden’s  pertussis vaccination program. 

In the US by the mid-1980s, lawsuits related to vaccine safety led several manufacturers to withdraw their DTP vaccines and paved the way to the US National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NVCIA) in 1986. This act provides funds to compensate for adverse events following immunization. Faced with such widespread apprehension surrounding DTP safety, great efforts were made to develop acellular pertussis vaccines.

According to the NVIC website, Fisher’s activism played a key role in raising awareness of the DTP toxicity and in passing the 1986 NVCIA.

In 1991, a new, safer pertussis vaccine was developed - the acellular pertussis vaccine (aP), and the DTaP vaccine replaced DTP by about 2000. This was likely the “discontinued vaccine” that Dwoskin remembers from her kids’ 2-month pediatrician visit in 1999.

This DTP story is significant because it was the first aluminum-containing vaccine. Since it was introduced in 1940s, the question becomes - home come the “autism epidemic” only started in 1989 according to the EPA study Kennedy and Wakefield cite? Doesn’t this alone eliminate aluminum as the cause of autism, if, as Kennedy claims, there was no autism in 1960s? Unfortunately, it’s not a simple argument to make, given the toxicity of DTP and the fear of “encephalopathy,” however unfounded. 

Kennedy recently attacked the DTP vaccine, which remains in use in low and middle-income countries due to its low cost. He wants us to ignore it in the aluminum-autism discussion. And if we do that, the next aluminum-containing vaccines - HBV and HiB - were introduced in 1980s, which fits the 1989 start date perfectly.

But first, we need to touch on the mercury era to understand why attacks on aluminum came so much later.

Mercury - the next frontier

Once DPT was replaced by DPaT, the antivax community focused on the next target: mercury. This included NVIC, SafeMinds (whose leader, Lyn Redwood, is now heading up vaccine safety at the CDC), and World Mercury Project (later renamed Children’s Health Defense). “SafeMinds put all their eggs in the mercury basket,” said one of their members recently. 

Why not aluminum?

When I was growing up Russia, and I would get sick, my mom would pull out a glass thermometer with a tiny tube filled with mercury in the middle. If we dropped it, it would break and I watched in fascination as little shiny droplets of mercury would roll on the floor, splitting and coalescing. My mom would get on her knees and catch each one with a piece of cotton. “It’s poison,” she would tell me.

She was right - mercury is a known toxin. And not just to humans, but to microbes as well. A preservative was developed about 100 years ago that has a sulfur group (thio), mercury (mer), and a salicylic acid (sal) was called Thi-mer-o-sal (in the US) or Thio-mer-sal (ex-US). This became a go-to preservative used in vaccine vials that had more than one dose in them. Such vials are much cheaper per dose to make, but there is a problem: when the first dose is drawn by sticking the needle into the rubber stopper, bacteria and fungal spores would be introduced that would start multiplying while it’s sitting in the refrigerator. Hence the need for a preservative.

To a lay person, removing mercury from vaccines might make a lot of sense. For a child prior to 2001, there were only two main sources of exposure to mercury: vaccines and fish. 

Aluminum is a different story. 

Part II to follow.