![]() Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for antivaxxers to try to link COVID-19 vaccines to cancer as well, with attempts beginning even before the FDA granted an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer vaccine two years ago. (Oncogenes are genes that cause cancer in experimental animals and, in some cases, humans.) ![]() (SV40 is a monkey virus known as SV40, which stands for “Simian Vacuolating Virus 40” and was found to have contaminated some of the cells that the virus was grown in, specifically kidney cells derived from Asian rhesus monkeys.) The gory details aren’t important for purposes of what I’m about to discuss-and I’ve already written in depth about what happened and why this claim, although plausible because SV40 was one of the first oncogenic viruses ever discovered. As I wrote ten years ago, the original version of this claim derived from the observation that an early batche of the polio vaccine from the 1950s, particularly Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine, were contaminated with SV40, which led to a “cancer epidemic” over the coming decades. One of the oldest antivax tropes, one I recall encountering beginning soon after I started paying attention to the antivaccine movement, is that vaccines somehow cause cancer. “Turbo cancer” is not a thing, and the evidence cited is as weak as any antivax “evidence”, including anecdotes and misinterpretation of epidemiology. Over the last several months, antivaxxers have been claiming that COVID-19 vaccines cause “turbo cancer”, cancers (or cancer recurrences) of a particularly aggressive and fast-growing variety diagnosed in younger and younger patients.
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