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.