The CHD-touted science paper claiming "55 undeclared chemical elements" were found in COVID vaccines is a HOAX ... and must be retracted ... here's why

The ICP-MS instrument used for the study can't even detect chemicals, for starters.

The alternative media / alternative health is abuzz today with claims that "55 undeclared chemical elements" were found in COVID vaccines, according to a pre-print research paper that claims to have conducted ICP-MS analysis of vaccines.

Children's Health Defense covered this paper in this article on their website.

The paper is a hoax.

ICP-MS instruments don't detect chemicals. I own two of these instruments and have run them for over a decade, testing over 10,000 food and supplement samples for heavy metals and nutritive elements. ICP-MS instruments detect elements (like Pb, Zn, Cd, Hg, U, Ca, As, etc.) but are incapable of detecting chemicals.

Thus, the instrument used for the paper is incapable of detecting "chemicals," even though most of the alt media reporting on this paper is claiming "chemicals" were found. Once you understand the difference between atomic elements and chemicals, you'll know why this paper is a hoax.

As we all hopefully learned in high school science class, chemicals are made of atomic elements. When you combine atomic elements into certain configurations, you create molecules. Such as H2O (water) or CO2 (carbon dioxide). Molecules can also be called chemicals. To be considered a "chemical," a molecule must involve some level of chemistry, which necessarily involves the combining of two or more elements.

If you break apart molecules or chemicals into their atomic element constituents, you can count those atomic elements with an ICP-MS instrument. The instrument has a plasma torch that obliterates molecules, blasting them apart into individual atomic elements. These elements are ionized (and aerosolized) into a charged ion stream, filtered through a quadrupole and flung against a photo-multiplier tube (PMT) to count the atomic elements.

Nowhere in this process are "chemicals" counted or even preserved. The very process of using an ICP-MS instrument destroys all chemicals and molecules.

Yet almost everyone in alternative media is widely reporting that this paper found "55 undetected chemicals" in COVID vaccines. It found no such thing. It merely counted atomic elements. Even more interesting is the fact that the paper didn't find any toxic levels of any elements at all.

Here are some other problems with the paper:

- The study authors strongly imply that these atomic elements are extremely toxic in the concentrations found, but that's simply not true. Many of the concentrations of elements were found in low parts per trillion. Given the 0.5 ml injection volume of a typical vaccine, this is essentially zero. The paper didn't cite any evidence at all which would support claims of toxicity at these dosages.

- The paper describes a sample prep process that is riddled with obvious errors. For example, it claims that, "Samples were taken with a 5 μL Hamilton syringe (“Gas tight”), a puncture was made in each rubber septum, extracting a sample volume into a previously tared polypropylene tube, recording the mass of the extracted sample on an analytical balance (between 0.22 and 0.33 g)." Yet anyone who has any experience in liquid volumes in a laboratory setting would instantly know that 5 microliters of a liquid cannot possibly weigh between 0.22 and 0.33 grams. It's absurd, unless you're standing on a planet with something like sixty times the gravity of Earth. On Earth, 5 microliters of water weighs 0.005 grams.

- The dilution factor calculations shown in the paper are clearly off. The paper describes taking 5 microliters of a sample, adding it to 1 ml of nitric acid and then for some reason vortexing it for 6 days. This is truly bizarre, given that all you need is a hot block to "cook" the sample for less than two hours, and you're done. But even more bizarre is the fact that these scientists then add 9 ml of additional nitric acid + water to the sample tube, bringing the total volume up to 10 ml. And here they make a huge error, claiming they have now achieved a dilution of "1 to 10." In fact, they have achieved a dilution of 1 to 2000 because they now have 5 microliters of the original sample in 10 ml of liquid (nitric acid + water). This is easy to confirm yourself, because if you had, let's say, 5 ml of sample in 10 ml of water, that would be 1 to 2, right? Well, a micro liter is 1,000 times less than a milli liter. So since 5 micro liters of water was introduced into a total volume of 10 milli liters of water, you have a dilution factor of 1 to 2,000. If they enter the wrong dilution factor into the Agilent software they are using, all their reported concentration numbers will be wrong. This number is manually entered into ChemStation or MassHunter software. If you screw it up, you nuke all your results.

- Nobody that I have ever seen in the world of ICP-MS laboratory science would make such a simple mistake. Nobody prepares samples in this manner. No one would use 5 microliters of a sample and dilute it to 10 ml in a sample vial and then try to run that in an ICP-MS instrument, because you're stretching the limits of what the instrument can detect. Later in the same paper, they claim that sample volumes of up to 100 microliters were sometimes used, but that still suffers from the same problem, and the dilution calculations would still be off.

- So now, with a dilution of 1 to 2000, your instrument needs 2000 times more signal to arrive at a calculated concentration of ppb for the analyte, for example. Importantly, the Agilent ICP-MS instrument used in this study isn't capable of achieving the sensitivities claimed in the paper's results. I know this because, like I said, I own two such instruments that are actually newer than the one used in this study. And I also know that if you dilute your sample by a factor of 2,000, your signal-to-noise ratio goes to crap at these low concentrations. It is impossible for this instrument to have achieved the parts per trillion concentrations claimed by the paper for many of the elements detected.

- Additionally, the paper cites no evidence that any of the elements found in low parts per trillion concentrations are even dangerous at those levels. For example, the paper claims to have found Ruthenium at 1 part per trillion. In a typical 0.5 ml vaccine injection dose, that would inject roughly half a trillionth of a gram of ruthenium into someone. You probably get at least a thousand times higher dose than that by eating sea salt in your dinner. Just because some hard-to-pronounce element is injected into the body at trivial doses doesn't mean it is highly toxic and scare-worthy.

- One of the elements "found" in the paper is Terbium (Tb), listed at 0.0002 parts per billion. That's 0.2 parts per trillion, or 200 parts per quadrillion. So now we're getting into picograms of elemental masses being found in vaccines, which is not only far beyond the capability of the ICP-MS instrument in the first place, but it's also inconsequential in terms of human health. There is zero health risk associated with such unimaginably low concentrations of elements, even "heavy metals" such as lead. Even mercury, at this extremely low concentration. If picograms of rare elements were deadly, we'd all be long dead by now.

- The well-known toxic elements like lead, cadmium and mercury were hardly found in the vaccines at all. So all the talk about "heavy metals!" turns out to be nonsense. Mercury was absent in two of the three Moderna vials tested. In the third vial, it was 13 parts per billion. At a 0.5 ml injection dose, that's a total exposure of 6.5 nanograms of mercury. Would I prefer this to be zero? Yes. Is it going to harm someone at 6.5 billionths of a gram? Almost certainly not. At a million times higher dose, yes, that would be toxic, but not at low single-digit nanograms.

- The study uses language that says samples "contain mercury," but without consideration of the concentration in the context of whether it's a harmful dose, such language is meaningless. Every drop of ocean water "contains mercury" at some level, if your instrument is sensitive enough. You can find picograms, femtograms or even smaller masses of nearly every element in nearly everything, if you look for it. "Testing positive" for mercury is a meaningless claim. "Contains mercury" is also meaningless. It's the concentration that matters, not the fact that these is just one atomic element of Hg in something. Have you tested trees recently? Trees contain mercury, too. When they burn in forest fires, they release mercury. It doesn't mean that trees are bad.

- The study says the 55 "chemical elements" are "undeclared," implying that there is some law or regulatory requirement that vaccines declare their elemental composition. There is no such requirement because that would be absurd. It would like requiring breakfast cereal companies to print an elemental breakdown on their Nutrition Facts labels, listing how much Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, etc., are found in their product at an atomic level. This is absolutely absurd, especially given that 99% of the public doesn't know the difference between elements vs. molecules, as is now evidenced by the fact that so many people are talking up this analysis as "55 chemicals" being found in vaccines. The study authors know full well that using the term "undeclared" is click-bait-ish and has no scientific or regulatory foundation at all. The use of that term is to clearly make the analysis sound scary and alarming and to imply that the vaccine makers are hiding something about atomic elements. And yet the ICP-MS analysis itself found near-zero levels of nearly all elements which could be considered even remotely toxic. The elements with very high concentrations -- sodium, potassium, magnesium, etc., -- are all things you would expect to find in saline solution. And, therefore, also in human blood.

Unfortunately, because few people understand the difference between elements vs chemicals, much of the alt media / health freedom community has seized on this study, claiming "55 undeclared chemicals!" as if some huge breakthrough has been discovered. In doing this, they only contribute to the realization that scientific illiteracy is shockingly widespread, even in the health freedom movement. I can assure you that science-trained individuals like Tom Luongo (now a finance expert, but who has a background in lab chemistry) and Dr. Shiva are laughing mercilessly at this study. So are qualified lab scientists at the FDA, CDC, NIH and Big Pharma. To them, the fact that this "study" is being widely touted by the health freedom movement only proves, in their view, how the movement is steeped in junk science. That's unfortunate, which is why I'm pointing this out publicly. We've got to police our own movement and call out the obvious junk science when we see it.

There's also, by the way, a whole lot of junk science found in what people claim to be seeing under their microscopes, but that's a topic for a different day. I've noticed a disturbing trend where everything that looks like a crystal is now being called a "microchip." I will probably do a video with my lab microscope to try to explain this another time.

Conclusion

The study is a hoax. The ICP-MS instrument can't detect "chemicals" in the first place. The reported numbers for many elements are far beyond the sensitivity capabilities of the instrument. The sample prep procedure is bizarre. The dilution calculations are wrong. The scary-sounding language of "undeclared" elements isn't scientific or rooted in any regulatory requirements at all.

Children's Health Defense got duped, sadly, and the study actually thanks by name many people related to CHD who are otherwise very well-informed science-minded people but who clearly didn't know enough about ICP-MS analysis to realize the study was a hoax.

CHD should actually read these papers and understand them before writing stories about them. I'm happy to help in the future, but nobody seems to care about real ICP-MS science from a published, experienced expert who knows what they're talking about.

For the record, I am not defending the overall safety of these vaccines. I have publicly stated that I believe COVID jabs are "depopulation bioweapons." But an ICP-MS instrument can't determine that, and the elemental composition of the vaccines won't unveil its secrets. The proper analysis would involve protein analysis which is highly complex and requires very different instruments. Proteins are massive compared to atomic elements, perhaps like the size of Planet Earth compared to a ping pong ball. And the mRNA payload cannot be understood from ICP-MS analysis.

I will never take one of these jabs myself, and I strongly recommend others avoid them. But I'm not going to run around citing bad science papers to try to justify that, and when I see a ICP-MS hoax parading around as "55 undeclared chemicals!" I have to call bullshit on that. Because it's pure bullshit, and CHD should know better than to peddle it.