Can covid-19 vaccines cause 'turbo cancers'?
Brown University professor weighs in on mRNA vaccine safety and concerns about 'turbo cancers.'
A fiery debate has been raging about the possible link between covid-19 vaccines and ‘turbo cancers.’
The subject was thrust into the spotlight after an article published in The Atlantic in Sept 2022, told the story of well-known Belgian immunologist Michel Goldman, who thought the covid-19 vaccine had accelerated his lymphoma.
Knowing that chemotherapy would render him immunocompromised, Goldman rushed out to get vaccinated and boosted against covid-19 before commencing his cancer treatment.
But after his booster, he began to feel increasingly unwell - swollen lymph nodes, fatigue, and night sweats. A subsequent CT scan showed new cancer clusters “like someone had set off fireworks inside his body.”
The story prompted a flood of anecdotes on social media about people’s cancers becoming ‘turbo charged’ following covid vaccination and some doctors said they had observed a spike in aggressive cancers in young patients.
Other doctors fiercely criticised the article for stoking vaccine hesitancy. Prominent haematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad took to social media to say The Atlantic article was “irresponsible.”
“Where is the evidence that mRNA vaccines fuel cancer growth even in a subset of people? Case-reports don't count, obviously. You need careful epidemiological evidence to make such a claim. Where is that? Do that before you cover it in the news. Duh,” tweeted Prasad at the time.
Now that DNA contamination has been detected in Pfizer and Moderna covid vaccines, it has fuelled speculation about cancer risks and has been the target of many “fact-checkers.”
So, I decided to speak with physician-scientist and medical oncologist Professor Wafik El-Deiry, about his thoughts on covid vaccines and “turbo cancers.”
El-Deiry is Director of the Cancer Center at Brown University and has a 30-year career in cancer research. Recently, he received the 2023 Inventor Of The Year award for his work related to novel cancer therapeutics.
DEMASI: Professor El-Deiry, what is “turbo cancer” and is it even a thing?
EL-DEIRY: It’s a term that refers to something in oncology we call “hyper-progression” which is the unexpected rapid progression of cancer. I think most practising oncologists know that a small percentage of patients who get cancer treatment, end up having a tumour that grows faster. This has been seen with immunotherapy for example.
DEMASI: But some people think it can be caused by covid-19 vaccines?
EL-DEIRY: I have seen case reports of hyper-progressive cancers after covid vaccination where it looks like there is a relationship with how rapidly these tumours are growing. But it's an association. It's not proof that it caused it. This isn't the easiest thing to uncover because we know that patients in remission can have cancers that come back, sometimes the tumours grow and don't respond to treatment.
DEMASI: So, you’re not saying covid vaccines cause turbo cancers, but you’re not dismissing it either?
EL-DEIRY: There are anecdotes [eg 1, 2, 3 and 4], so why not do the studies? We are three years into this, there’s no roaring pandemic out there, life has largely come back to normal, so why haven't we nailed down these things?
DEMASI: Because anecdotes are often dismissed…
EL-DEIRY: Well, anecdotes may not be your cup of tea as far as acceptable evidence goes but I think anecdotes matter. Case reports and case series are relevant and important. What's more important is if there are anecdotes, that through the scientific process, people then dig in deeper and try to establish if there is a cause.
I put it out there on social media and people were just dismissing it and they were assassinating the characters of individuals who were raising questions. Is this what we want in science?
DEMASI: You were accused of being an anti-vaxxer?
EL-DEIRY: I would not ever be referred to as somebody who is anti-vaccines. I was very eager to get a vaccine for COVID by December of 2020. I'm somebody who's had four shots now, but after the last shot, I didn't feel great. I wanted to see some evidence about risks and benefits for me personally.
So, I’m not anti-vax. I'm also pro science and somebody who focuses on facts, and I feel strongly that the current climate is very polarised, people have strong emotions. Let's be clear about something. As a physician, I would never discourage somebody at risk, e.g. the elderly, or somebody with comorbidities, we definitely want to protect those people.
DEMASI: I did see you caused a stir on social media….
EL-DEIRY: Frankly, based on the backlash over the 10 days, I really have no interest in… I mean, I hesitated even about doing this interview, which is one of the reasons I wanted to explain where I'm coming from… if you shut down discourse, if you shut down conversation, that's a detriment to science and medicine.
Someone actually tagged my university and my medical school on X (formerly twitter) because he's a Brown University alum and he basically was writing publicly that the things I’m saying are ruining Brown’s reputation. I’m only asking questions, I shouldn't have to be worried about my reputation, or what's going to happen to me at the university.
DEMASI: Have you been asked by your University to simmer down?
EL-DEIRY: No, I have had a couple of colleagues in the field say to me, ‘you should just stay out of this. You don't need this.’ And they have their views. I’ve had one who asked me to take a tweet down, but it's my freedom of speech. It's a sad day for science when we can't have conversations because it becomes too politicised and polarised with hostilities and accusations.
DEMASI: Well, I appreciate you trusting me with this….Regarding cancer, have you seen any unusual increase in turbo cancers in your vaccinated patients?
EL-DEIRY: I am a practising medical oncologist, but I have a limited practice. I can tell you this, I have recommended the COVID vaccine with no reservations to all my patients with cancer and I have not really thought about any potential relationship to how they're responding to the vaccine or the patterns of growth of their tumour, because they have been considered a group that's at risk that we need to protect. And so I don't have enough knowledge to be able to tell you for sure.
DEMASI: Right, so nothing unusual that alarms you?
EL-DEIRY: No, I have not for something so rare. I’ve read about these things and some of the mechanisms certainly seem plausible. But the answer to whether the vaccines are causing more cancers in the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, is that we are just not seeing it yet….at the moment, they’re just anecdotes of aggressive cancers in people, but there’s no smoking gun that would point to the cause.
DEMASI: How difficult would it be to determine whether aggressive cancers are due to the covid vaccine?
EL-DEIRY: It would be very, very difficult to know and I'll tell you what some of the difficulties are. I'm a colon cancer specialist and rates of colon cancer among younger individuals have been rising for 20 years and it doesn't seem to be related to the classical familial syndromes. It’s something else….people say obesity, maybe the microbiome, maybe the diet, it could be any range of exposures.
Trying to relate it to the vaccine would be extremely complicated. During covid, people weren't getting their cancer screening, and weren't necessarily getting treated on time and some had less access to care, including disadvantaged populations. And so, diagnoses of cancer actually came down during the pandemic, but are expected to go up over the next decade. So, how do you sort out the causes?
DEMASI: Recently, you spoke up about Phillip Buckhaults and his findings of DNA contamination in Pfizer’s vaccine….why?
EL-DEIRY: I have been involved in the world of cancer research now for over 30 years and Philip Buckhaults came out of the same training environment at Johns Hopkins. I know his background well, and not only can I speak for his competence, but also his integrity. I thought his communication with the Senate in South Carolina was very clear and he stayed in his lane.
DEMASI: Yes, this replicated the work of Kevin McKernan….What was it about Buckhaults’ Senate testimony that got your attention?
EL-DEIRY: Phillip has shown there are billions of DNA fragments contaminating the mRNA vaccine. He’s been doing this for a long time. The fragments may get into cells with the help of lipid nanoparticles, and into the nucleus and may even get integrated in the genome. This may lead to something, or it may lead to nothing. But I think we should find out.
It’s possible that lipid nanoparticles could get into locally recruited immune cells or muscle stem cells or endothelial cells and then cause lymphoma, sarcoma, or angiosarcoma.
DEMASI: There are so many questions unanswered…
EL-DEIRY: Yes, we don’t know the host response to DNA fragments in the cytoplasm, right? We assume it's normal, we assume there are no issues. But can you put a number on the risk? Are we going to discover in 10 years, that there was a certain risk of cancer? We need to learn more about where these DNA fragments end up.
Our cells are constantly repairing DNA damage but what happens if some of these DNA fragments in lipid nanoparticles enter the nucleus of a dividing cells? What happens if they get into stem cells? Regarding cancer, one of the biggies is to figure out how rare is it that something like this happens, and whether it can disrupt a gene? What is the remote chance this can happen in the germline? What is the chance genomic integration can happen in some pre-neoplastic cells in the body? How will we know if we don't look for rare events? Could some of the answers be found in the blood or in autopsies on individuals who died? The very rare very sick people who die hold molecular secrets in their tissues that could be uncovered.
The Nobel Prize was just won recently for the discovery that pseudouridine stabilises the mRNA from immune attack. How long does it last in the body and how much variation is there in the population? Different people may have different abilities to metabolise and get rid of it.
DEMASI: I’ve been asking these questions of the drug companies, and the regulators… they’re evasive…
EL-DEIRY: The question I want to know is why not eliminate the DNA contamination? It would certainly minimise risk and remove some worry. Perhaps they’re already working on it now, and we don’t know about it. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. It's very possible that the FDA and the vaccine companies are addressing this, and we will only know what happened historically. I would like to know if the FDA has recommended to the companies to remove the contamination or for more studies to better define risks.
DEMASI: The regulator just keeps saying “safe and effective”
EL-DEIRY: My main concern is with informed consent. I've taken a bunch of shots and I don't remember ever having somebody telling me there is a small risk of this or that. We need to know the numbers….is it 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a million… I don't like it when the FDA just dismisses these things and gives you format answers, a copy and paste that says “safe and effective.”
When you make a sweeping recommendation to the whole population, we all know, some people are going to be more at risk for things than others. Whether its 1% or 0.001%, once you start talking about millions of people taking the vaccine, it becomes significant.
DEMASI: The finding of DNA contamination seems significant…
EL-DEIRY: One has to be careful about what is being called significant. Yes, contamination has been found. But what does it mean for public health? It could be a very low risk. We need to know the risk across different populations, with different hosts. People have different susceptibilities. Everything is about balancing risk and benefit.
DEMASI: So people have different abilities to deal with DNA fragments in the covid vaccines?
EL-DEIRY: Well, we know people have differences in their immune system and their DNA repair pathways and their metabolism. Everybody has different genetic backgrounds and different abilities to repair DNA breaks or to respond to foreign material in the body. Look at people with BRCA1/2 missing - they might not have good repair mechanisms if DNA fragments get into the genome and disrupt genes. So, are they more susceptible to genome integration events? Could DNA fragments accelerate cancer formation? Or is there a chance the fragments can disrupt a gene like p53, or some other tumour suppressor gene that causes cancer?
I actually asked an expert in DNA repair if we know about the range of DNA repair abnormalities in the general population and the answer was that we don't really know. We know about the severe ones like BRCA1/2 and related genes that impact one’s ability to repair DNA damage, but there’s a spectrum. It's easy for regulators to say, you have nothing to worry about, but where's the data? Right, so that’s my longer-term concern.
DEMASI: What does your gut tell you about how likely it is to occur?
EL-DEIRY: I think genomic integration events might be very rare in humans. Cancer takes time to develop so there's no easy way to know the answer now, other than to be on the lookout and to let physicians, scientists and pathologists do what they do well.
Cancer risk is a complex issue. The accelerated growth of a cancer may not have to do with DNA contamination in the vaccine but may be a function of perturbations of the immune system, probably in susceptible hosts.
DEMASI: You mean, people’s immune systems are perturbed, and this allows cancer to grow?
EL-DEIRY: It’s possible. There is certainly plenty of evidence and every oncologist knows that immune suppression for example can lead to cancer.
I honestly don't know the truth. I don’t know for how long that spike hangs around in the body and the consequences for the immune system in dealing with it. I have read that spike can still be there at 6 months….and then, what happens with multiple boosters? It’s unclear.
There could be immune effects, there’s been some talk about IgG4 switching [see article for explanation], or it could be with the contamination of DNA which gets into the genome because that could disrupt tumour suppressor genes.
These are complex discussions and Buckhaults is probably right. Maybe this is more of a scientific discussion, and not for the lay public?
DEMASI: I think the public needs transparency….With so many uncertainties it’s why people say it’s the inversion of the precautionary principle…. First do no harm and suspend the vaccine until we find out these answers…
EL-DEIRY: I don't look at it in quite that way, and I wouldn’t recommend categorically suspending a vaccine that has saved millions of lives. I look at it as that there’s something wrong with sweeping recommendations that everybody should get the vaccine. If they are mandated, that's one thing, but if they're recommendations, that's another thing. I personally believe people can make informed decisions if they want to take a treatment. As long as there’s informed consent certainly in consultation with their doctors, but I agree there should be more awareness of these issues of concern, or where there is incomplete data related to potential outcomes of things like DNA contamination, or a range of susceptible hosts within the population.
DEMASI: Thanks for your time Professor El-Deiry.
Anecdotally I have seen more patients with cancer over the last year and I do not have a cancer practice. ABS quotes "The number of deaths due to cancer was 8.1% above the baseline average in May 2023 and 1.7% above May 2022. Cancer deaths in January to May 2023 were 7.4% above baseline average and 0.9% above the same period in 2022." On so many levels the risk of future cancer is consistent with what we know about the Covid so-called vaccines. Inflammation, DNA fragment contamination, spike protein production without an "off switch", effects on IgG4.
At least we should be completely open to the possibility that this may be a long term problem.
Well balanced answers. I wonder if his non-scientist views would differ from what he answered here.