Billions of doses of ground-breaking Covid vaccines have been dished out globally since the early days of the pandemic. They have, without doubt, saved many millions of lives.
But a highly controversial claim has been thrust into the spotlight: some of the jabs cause cancer.
President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has raised safety concerns and Florida’s surgeon general, Dr Joseph Lapado, said they are ‘not appropriate for use in human beings’. The state of Iowa has already moved to enforce an outright ban.
In the UK last month, broadcaster Piers Morgan declared on his YouTube show that he’d had lunch with ‘one of the top cancer experts in Britain’ who warned hospitals were ‘reaping a whirlwind in the world of cancer as a result of the vaccines’.
So how seriously should we take these claims, considering just how many of us have had multiple of these jabs?
Overwhelmingly, mainstream doctors, global medicines regulators and world vaccine experts say there is no cause for concern.
But here we look at the claims and the evidence so you can make up your own mind…
Broadcaster Piers Morgan giving the thumbs up as he was given a Covid vaccine
Q) Surely this is a conspiracy theory. Wouldn’t doctors be raising the alarm if it turned out the vaccines – which almost all of us have had – cause cancer?
A)Â Well, a handful of doctors in the US, UK and Australia have raised concerns about mRNA Covid vaccines.
Rolled out for the first time during the pandemic, they work in a different way to other vaccines.
It introduces a piece of genetic code into the body to make it produce proteins. These proteins then help prime the immune system to recognise and destroy the virus. However, some doctors say they have seen a troubling rise in the number of ‘aggressive, untreatable’ cancers since the vaccine rollout.
Angus Dalgleish, a professor of oncology at St George’s, University of London, says he began seeing cancer returning in patients who’d been successfully treated for melanoma in early 2022 – and they all recently had Covid boosters.
Colorectal surgeon Dr T. James Royle says that he has seen an increase in incurable stage-four colorectal cancer – those that affect the colon or the rectum – with it returning in patients he ‘considered cured’. He also links it to the Covid vaccines.
There are also case reports in medical literature of patients developing lymphatic cancers after vaccination.
But, equally, there are patients whose tumours shrunk after getting the jabs.
And Cancer Research UK, which has world-renowned specialists on its books, says there is ‘no good evidence’ of any link between the jabs and cancer.
Some experts point out that if they did cause cancer, there would be a huge rise in cancers of the soft tissue or bone in the shoulder, where the jabs go in, which has not materialised
Q) I have read that more and more people are getting cancer now. If it isn’t vaccines, what’s going on?
A) It is too early to say from official data. NHS England’s cancer diagnosis data has only been revealed up to 2022, and there was a spike in 2021 likely driven by cases which weren’t diagnosed during the pandemic.
And the truth is that rising cancer rates highlighted in recent headlines – particularly in the under-50s – have been escalating since 1990. Significantly they aren’t rising as fast in older people – a group that have had more jabs than most, thanks to the booster programmes.
Some experts also point out if they did cause cancer, there would be a huge rise in cancers of the soft tissue or bone in the shoulder, where the jabs go in, which has not materialised.
Data from the UK regulator, the MHRA, suggests just 0.0008 per cent of the 500,000 reports of side effects from the Pfizer jab, and 0.0004 per cent of reports linked to the Moderna jab, relate to cancer.
Q) We’d never used mRNA-type vaccines before Covid. Were they rushed through before we knew they were safe?
A) While mRNA jabs had been in development for decades, the pandemic was the first time they were used. And it’s true they were rolled out at a faster pace than usual, and some largely anticipated minor side effects did emerge such as headaches and nausea.
Myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, was a risk for one in 10,000, particularly young men, and thrombocytopenia, which can cause blood clots, was also seen very rarely. However, the blood clot risk was significantly more serious for those who had the AstraZeneca vaccine, which did not contain mRNA – it has been linked with 71 deaths in the UK.
No such link has ever emerged between the mRNA jabs and cancer – despite over ten years of animal trials. And Cancer Research UK points out that mRNA technology is being used to develop new jabs that are showing promise in actually preventing lung, ovarian and other types of cancer. ‘We have mRNA in abundance in all of our cells so there’s nothing that will do us any harm,’ says Stephen Griffin, professor of cancer virology at the University of Leeds.
Q) Doesn’t the vaccine contain a monkey virus that causes cancer?
A) The mRNA vaccines do contain a tiny amount of DNA from a monkey virus called SV40, which is used in the manufacturing process.
The virus causes cancer in monkeys and other mammals but, crucially, not in humans. And the fragment of the virus’s DNA which is used is not the part that causes cancer.
It has also been used for decades to manufacture other vaccines such as insulin for type 1 diabetes, polio jabs and hepatitis vaccines – and no increased risk of cancer has ever been found.
Professor Griffin says you could ‘inject yourself with SV40 and not get cancer’.
Professor Angus Dalgleish says he began seeing cancer returning in patients who’d been successfully treated for melanoma in early 2022 – and they all recently had Covid boosters
Q) I’ve heard that the vaccines can change your DNA. Is this true?
A) No. There’s no evidence that mRNA vaccines can change your DNA. For this to happen, mRNA would have to enter the central part of our cells known as the nucleus, which contains DNA, and then merge with it to cause genetic changes.
Some small laboratory studies do suggest mRNA can enter the nucleus. But the scientists carrying out these studies say this does not prove it happens in vaccinated people – or that it would have an effect on someone’s DNA if it did.
‘Even if mRNA did get into the nucleus of a cell – which isn’t impossible – that doesn’t guarantee it gets incorporated into chromosomal DNA,’ says Professor Robin Shattock, an expert in vaccine technology at Imperial College London.
Professor Griffin points out that every time our immune system fights an infection, our bodies end up littered with bits of viral or bacterial RNA and DNA. ‘If this was always getting incorporated into our own DNA, we’d all be gelatinous blobs,’ he says.
Q) So we can rule out a link with cancer, then?
A) Not completely. There are some questions we still don’t have the answers to.
There is some evidence, for example, the spike protein the body produces in response to mRNA vaccines can potentially bind to genes known to suppress cancer. These genes include p53, BRCA1 – linked to ovarian, breast and prostate cancer – and MSH, linked to bowel cancer.
But the spike protein from Covid infection also binds to them, Professor Shattock says. ‘People are looking to see if Covid itself could be driving up cancer cases, but there are no conclusions. Ultimately, we don’t know.’
