Wait, Could RFK Jr.’s Batsh*t Beliefs Actually Prevent Us from Curing Cancer?

4 min readAny Democratic candidate who is not referring to the administration as “being a tool of the pro-cancer lobby” is really missing the gurney on a great opportunity. It seems that science is on—or even partway over—the brink of a breakthrough regarding vaccines against certain types of cancers. From Jonathan Cohn at the Bulwark:This past Wednesday, Moderna and Merck announced positive results from a major clinical trial using a cancer vaccine of the kind Wu and her team had envisioned. The target was melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Using the vaccine in combination with a common cancer drug—rather than relying on the cancer drug alone—significantly reduced the recurrence of melanoma after tumor removal, according to the companies.Merck and Moderna did not release the actual data, saying they would do so at an upcoming medical meeting. Until that happens, it’s impossible to be sure exactly what their tests show, or how significant the outcome is. But the reported findings from the large trial appear to be consistent with the outcome of a previous, much smaller trial. “This looks like a home run,” Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, told me in a phone interview. Emanuel’s reaction was not unusual. Scientists across the country and the world have been buzzing about the news because, if the results hold up, they will be proof of concept for the kind of cancer vaccines researchers have long hoped to create. “This could be revolutionary,” Catharine Young, a biomedical scientist and former Biden administration official who is now a senior fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told me.Except, of course, the fact that American public health is currently overseen by a lunatic.The administration has also attacked this specific type of vaccine. The Moderna-Merck treatment uses mRNA technology—as did two of the COVID vaccines—and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has singled out mRNA for particular vilification. Last year, he canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the research and development of mRNA technology, including Moderna’s work on what was supposed to be a new platform for vaccines against influenza. Kennedy’s animus toward mRNA vaccines, which is based on wild, unsupported conspiracy theories tying COVID shots to harm and death, has so far not led him to meddle with mRNA funding outside of the context of infectious disease. But scientists say his hostility is bound to have—and is already having—a chilling effect on research into mRNA for other purposes, including cancer. The same goes for the broader cuts the administration has made to research funding, despite claims from officials and their allies that truly important experiments into diseases like cancer haven’t taken a hit.Needless to say, this and other breakthroughs depend vitally on public-private partnerships willing to spend money on scientific speculation. Also needless to say, the current administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is a three-ring circus in which the chimps have organized a coup.Grants from the NIH are down, though it can be hard to tell that from the budget numbers because Congress ignored Trump’s request and kept the agency’s funding stable. The problem is that NIH hasn’t been spending all of that money. There are several reasons for the bottleneck, including new scrutiny of grant applications for words and subjects (like “diversity”) that trigger administration political sensitivities, delayed processing of grants (because of downsizing and loss of expertise across the Department of Health and Human Services), and a shift to multi-year grants (which has the effect of reducing annual grant awards). “On paper, it’s been allocated by Congress and they’re spending it,” Coller explained. “But what they’re doing is they’re paying forward grants in multiple-year increments, and what that essentially does is reduces the overall pool of grants by about 40 to 60 percent. ... It’s affecting almost every single researcher. And it all goes back to the memory of a dead raccoon’s penis. I’m guessing there.This is on top of Kennedy’s ongoing crusade against mRNA technology. Targeting vaccines is bound to have an effect on cancer research, if only because insights from one can so frequently help the other. The proof is in what’s happened already: The discoveries and improvements arising from years of working toward a cancer vaccine have made it easier for companies like Moderna to produce Covid vaccines quickly—and, now, knowledge from that exercise is guiding development of the cancer shots.“When you get what is essentially misinformation coming from the leader of HHS, when it’s antithetical to the scientific method, it sends a chill to the entire industry as well,” Coller said. “It says this is a government that’s not going to have scientific rigor, that is not going to base its judgments in fact. That changes the narrative of these companies to say, well, we won’t invest our money into the United States. We’ll move our technologies offshore because other countries have not done that.”Meanwhile, Secretary Roadkill is dealing with a measles outbreak in Pennsylvania that’s already killed two people, both of them in Lancaster County, site of one of the country’s largest Amish communities. This has prompted folks to go back to one of his greatest hits. From MSNow:Five years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered remarks in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he praised the community’s low childhood vaccination rates and downplayed the seriousness of measles. “I am a measles survivor,” he joked to laughs and applause, adding that he was “very, very lucky to have lived through that nightmare because we had to stay at home and watch TV the whole week with all of my brothers and sisters. It was horrible.” Kennedy added that chicken soup and vitamin A constitute a “cure for measles.”Ha, ha, ha.Quit now.