Viewpoint: COVID vaccines caused ‘turbo cancers’? MAHA disinformers revive long-debunked claims

Yes, you read that right. He posted an Infowars link about his review article. However, that wasn’t the worst, at least not in my not-so-humble opinion:

Children’s Health Defense? Seriously? If CHD were ever to praise and publicize a study or review article that I’d authored or co-authored, I would not be proud of it. Quite the opposite. I’d be deeply ashamed, to the point where I’d STFU and reexamine my entire professional life, scientific activities, and belief systems before daring to reemerge, most likely humbled and apologetic, especially if I had made the enormous reputation-damaging mistake that Dr. El-Deiry did. I quote from the CHD article:

Wafik El-Deiry, M.D., Ph.D., one of the co-authors, told The Defender that the paper “is the first most comprehensive presentation summarizing the world‘s literature on the subject matter of COVID vaccines, COVID infection and cancer.”

He said some of the review’s findings “look like a smoking gun” linking COVID-19 shots to cancer.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, said the review’s findings may represent “the tip of a very damaging iceberg.”

“It is not remotely surprising that a gene-therapy rebranded as a vaccine, never tested for oncogenic safety, with severe immune dysregulating effects, injected into a billion people would correlate with an increased risk of cancers worldwide,” Jablonowski said.

El-Deiry said the review may provide insights into rising cancer rates in recent years, including an increase in so-called “turbo cancers.”

“I believe there is a risk of cancer associated with COVID vaccination,” El-Deiry said. “The magnitude of the risk remains to be more precisely defined, including the risk of hyperprogression.” Hyperprogression refers to cases where “a pre-existing tumor grows more aggressively.”

…I will now examine the decline of a once-great scientist through the lens of this latest incident, which demonstrates how even the best of us can fall prey to ideology-based pseudoscience. True, this is not a story on par with that of, for instance, Linus Pauling‘s descent into “vitamin C cures everything, including cancer” quackery and Luc Montagnier’s fall into alternative medicine and antivax quackery. Both were Nobel Laureates for whom I once coined the term “Nobel Disease” to describe Nobel Laureates who embraced nonsense in their later years. It is, nonetheless, very disappointing to me, as Dr. El-Deiry has made real and important contributions to oncology and the science of cancer ….

A sadly dubious review article begins

Let’s take a look at the review article on OncoTarget, COVID vaccination and post-infection cancer signals: Evaluating patterns and potential biological mechanisms, co-authored by Charlotte Kuperwasser and Wafik S. El-Deiry. The first thing I noticed was the rapid turnaround time, with the manuscript submitted November 26, accepted December 26, and published on January 3. Another thing that really struck me is the open peer review …. It makes me wonder who the peer reviewers were, given that these were some of the most milquetoast “critiques” I’ve seen and many of them missed the point of the big flaws in this “study.” I wonder even more based on this footnote to the paper:

The Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Wafik S. El-Deiry, was not involved in the peer-review process or the decision-making for this paper. Dr. El-Deiry shared the submitted manuscript with National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director Anthony Letai by email electronically on December 12, 2025.

So, even if Dr. El-Deiry “was not involved in the peer-review process or the decision-making for this paper,” he is the editor-in-chief of the journal. While I applaud him somewhat for trying to take the decision-making out of his own hands, I still have to wonder whether others involved with the journal would be willing to tell him that this paper didn’t meet peer-review standards. …

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, let’s cite the abstract of this review, so that everyone knows the broad outline of what the review claims to have done and to have found:

A growing number of peer-reviewed publications have reported diverse cancer types appearing in temporal association with COVID-19 vaccination or infection. To characterize the nature and scope of these reports, a systematic literature search from January 2020 to October 2025 was conducted based on specified eligibility criteria. A total of 69 publications met inclusion criteria: 66 article-level reports describing 333 patients across 27 countries, 2 retrospective population-level investigations (Italy: ~300,000 cohort, and Korea: ~8.4 million cohort) quantified cancer incidence and mortality trends among vaccinated populations, and one longitudinal analysis of ~1.3 million US military service members spanning the pre-pandemic through post-pandemic periods. Most of the studies documented hematologic malignancies (non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, cutaneous lymphomas, leukemias), solid tumors (breast, lung, melanoma, sarcoma, pancreatic cancer, and glioblastoma), and virus-associated cancers (Kaposi and Merkel cell carcinoma). Across reports, several recurrent themes emerged: (1) unusually rapid progression, recurrence, or reactivation of preexisting indolent or controlled disease, (2) atypical or localized histopathologic findings, including involvement of vaccine injection sites or regional lymph nodes, and (3) proposed immunologic links between acute infection or vaccination and tumor dormancy, immune escape, or microenvironmental shifts. The predominance of case-level observations and early population-level data demonstrates an early phase of potential safety-signal detection. These findings underscore the need for rigorous epidemiologic, longitudinal, clinical, histopathological, forensic, and mechanistic studies to assess whether and under what conditions COVID-19 vaccination or infection may be linked with cancer.

My first reaction was that the term “growing number of peer-reviewed publications” supposedly supporting a link between COVID-19 vaccines and cancer is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Second, I noted that these 69 reports only encompassed 333 patients with cancer, which, when weighed against the literally billions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered to billions of people, is a truly infinitesimally tiny number of cancer reports. Remember what I said as the vaccines started rolling out? Whenever you administer so many doses of a product to so many billions of people, there will be cases in which adverse events occur within close temporal proximity to vaccination by random chance alone, even highly implausible adverse events. I always like to bring up the example of, for instance, a person who receives a vaccine and then the next day dies due to a piece of granite falling off of a building, hitting them in a rare freak accident and coincidence. How do investigators determine that these rare cancers aren’t just a different example like the one I just mentioned? There are, of course, statistical methods to do that.

In any case, here’s a table that describes the literature surveyed:

Notice how the vast majority of the papers analyzed are case reports. I’ve discussed a number of these case reports myself, and I’ve found none particularly convincing for a mechanistic link between COVID vaccines and cancer, much less “turbo cancers.” Anyone wanna bet whether I see some of those papers here? Before I get into the case reports and studies included and the highly questionable interpretations of rare events, there’s an even bigger issue that jumped right out at me when I read the Materials and Methods section, where they described their search strategy for their scoping review:

A comprehensive search of the world’s literature was conducted using PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and React19 between January 2020 and April 2025. Eligible publications included case reports, case series, cohort or population-level analyses, systematic reviews, and mechanistic or preclinical studies that described either (i) new-onset, recurrent, or rapidly progressive malignancy temporally associated with COVID-19 vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infection, or (ii) experimental evidence implicating vaccine or infection-induced immune perturbations in oncogenic, proliferative, or metastatic processes.

Initial searches in PubMed using conventional keyword combinations such as “COVID-19 vaccine and cancer,” “vaccination and cancer,” “COVID-19 vaccine and tumor,” or cancer-specific terms paired with “COVID-19 vaccine” yielded little to no indexed results. Even when known case reports were used as anchors for “similar articles,” PubMed returned no related entries. This highlighted a structural limitation in standard indexing pathways and necessitated a broader, more strategic search approach.

Wait, what?

React19.org is a valid data source? I don’t think so

I basically facepalmed when I read that Kuperwasser and El-Deiry were including React19.org in their search strategy, along with more traditional databases like PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar? Notice how they justify including React19 because they didn’t find enough references searching PubMed using conventional keyword combinations related to vaccines and cancer. Let me just note that React19 is a highly dubious source, maintained by an organization that proclaims its purpose thusly:

React19 is a science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from longterm Covid-19 vaccine adverse events globally.

Our mission is to bring healing to the moms, dads, friends, and loved ones who are facing life-altering side effects from their Covid-19 vaccine. We build bridges between patients and research institutions in order to develop a better understanding of our vaccine complications. React19 works with both patients and providers, as well as research teams. Our programs all fall within our 3 categories of assistance (financial, physical, and emotional). Programs include funding, promoting, and sharing relevant scientific research; bringing the right medical teams together with patients; direct financial assistance; educational outreach; and supporting communities where impacted people can begin to heal physically and emotionally.

I examined React19.org’s X feed and soon found that it sure looks like an antivax org, full of anecdotes of alleged horrific injuries due to COVID-19 vaccines, even to the point of platforming longtime antivax activists like Dr. Sherri Tenpenny ….

Seriously, if you platform Dr. Tenpenny to discuss how “They” are suppressing the evidence regarding vaccine injuries, you’re antivax.

Right from the start, Dr. El-Deiry’s approach appears to be: If he can’t find articles damning COVID-19 vaccines from standard databases of biomedical research articles, he’ll look elsewhere, even if he has to turn to a source that is clearly antivax. If I were reviewing his manuscript, his inclusion of React19.org would have been enough, in and of itself, for me to strongly recommend rejecting the manuscript with extreme prejudice.

Epidemiological evidence for a COVID vaccine-cancer link? Not so much…

Kuperwasser and El-Deiry clearly want the reader to think that there is a cancer safety signal in epidemiological data. The problem is that the studies that they cite don’t really show that, at least not anywhere near convincingly. They all have serious confounders that can explain their results. One study in particular cited by Kuperwasser and El-Deiry stood out to me very strongly, mainly because I have discussed it before—and fairly recently. I’m referring to the Korean study that was being widely touted a few months ago as slam-dunk evidence that COVID vaccines are associated with an increased risk of cancer ….

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I deconstructed the study in depth not long after it was published; so I won’t go into great detail here. Suffice to say that this study, carried out in South Korea, screamed healthy vaccinee bias at me, given that it only looked at cancers diagnosed at one year. You might recall that healthy vaccinee bias is a type of confounding in observational studies (like this one, a retrospective observational study) where healthier, more health-conscious individuals are more likely to get vaccinated. This bias can lead to the overestimate of vaccine efficacy, which is obviously not an issue in this study, which didn’t even try to estimate vaccine efficacy. …

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DNA contamination a-go-go!

Moving on, Kuperwasser and El-Deiry really lose the plot when they discuss the issue of “DNA contamination” of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Recall that one of the tenets of the belief system behind “turbo cancer” is that there is a large amount of residual DNA contamination in the vaccines left over from the plasmids used to make the vaccine that the SV40 promoter sequence. I’ve discussed time and time again just how implausible this is and how bad the studies claiming to find high levels of DNA contamination in the vaccines are. Does any of this stop Kuperwasser and El-Deiry from citing the same crap studies, by the likes of Kevin McKernan and Didier Raoult? Of course not. It didn’t even stop him from citing a publication from Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law, the antivax fake journal founded by James Lyons-Weiler and published by his antivax org the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), which, in addition to publishing poor quality antivax studies, also launders retracted studies by antivaxxers by finding a new home for them that appears to be a legitimate journal.

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But, biology, man!

There is a whole section of the paper that tries to argue for biological plausibility based mainly on in vitro studies, for a couple of hypotheses. One is that the spike protein itself can cause cancer through a variety of biological activities. Perusing the list of articles cited to support this contention, I was struck by how most of them were looking at SARS-CoV-2 infection rather than vaccination. (Remember my discussion of speculation in 2024 that SARS-CoV-2 infection might predispose to cancer?) You might remember that Dr. El-Deiry himself published articles suggesting that the spike protein might bind to the p53 (TP53) tumor suppressor gene and thereby predispose to cancer, writing:

The transformation of a normal cell into a cancer cell involves disruption of multiple safeguards controlling cell growth, survival, and DNA repair. Laboratory studies have reported that the spike protein, whether it is produced by infection or by vaccination, has biological activities [110, 145, 152–158] with oncogenic potential [159–161]. For example, in addition to interacting with ACE2 receptors, spike protein fragments have been shown to interact with NRP-1, integrins, and TLRs leading to VEGF/NRP-1 signaling [155, 162, 163]. Spike protein has also been reported to induce DNA damage [160, 164, 165] and modify p53 pathway under oxidative stress [164, 166]. Therefore, in theory, such interactions of spike protein with these pathways could contribute to cellular transformation, both from the vaccine but also from infection, especially if the spike protein remains present long after vaccination or from multiple COVID infections.

The problem is that this is highly speculative. Indeed, the phrase “in theory” is doing some seriously heavy lifting here. As I read this, I asked myself one question: Has anyone demonstrated that the spike protein can transform cells, even in vitro? Nope. Not that I’m aware of. Until I see that, I will give this speculation all the due that it deserves; i.e., brief consideration before demanding some actual direct data.

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Near the end of the article, there’s a section called “Gaps in Knowledge.” I hate to say it, but this is basically an appeal to ignorance combined with a Gish gallop to give the impression that we know so little about how spike protein from SARS-CoV-2 or the vaccine causes cancer, without any actual evidence that the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2…oh, you know…actually causes cellular transformation or cancer, which is why I cringed when I read:

The distinction between vaccination associated tumor initiation and promotion also remains unresolved. There is no empirical validation that vaccination only accelerates pre-existing disease rather than also initiating new malignancies.

This is as perfect an example of putting the cart before the horse. There is no good evidence that COVID-19 vaccination causes new malignancies or accelerates pre-existing disease; certainly nothing but speculation based on carefully selected articles was presented in this review article, and even then the case presented was not very persuasive.

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Overall, this review article is basically a nothingburger. It’s far more speculation than anything else, as I mentioned before, a case of putting the cart before the horse. The authors carefully select three studies that they think they can point to as strong suggestive evidence in population studies that COVID-19 vaccination is associated with an increased risk of cancer. When these studies are examined in more detail, they all suffer from potential confounders that could easily explain their results, none more than the S. Korean study, which is about as obvious an example of healthy user/healthy vaccinee bias as I’ve ever seen. The authors also present a tiny number of case reports—at least the number is incredibly tiny relative to the billions upon billions of doses of vaccine that have been administered over the last four years—as though they suggested anything but the entirely predictable phenomenon that, if you administer a medication to a large enough number of people, you will find a number of bad things that happen to a number of people soon after receiving that medication by random chance alone. No convincing argument or evidence is presented to suggest causation.

Next, they list various mechanisms by which COVID-19 vaccines in general—and the spike protein in particular—might cause cancer. They then speculate wildly about these potential biological mechanisms and “gaps in knowledge” about COVID-19 vaccines and cancer. Most of these biological mechanisms strike me as a stretch, at best, particularly the invocation of “inflammation” as somehow activating dormant cancer cells that we all have in our bodies, again, because all vaccines cause transient inflammation, but the authors don’t address what is different about the inflammation caused by COVID-19 vaccines that it would lead to cancer.

There’s just one problem. If COVID-19 vaccines were truly responsible for a wave of “turbo cancers” or, as the authors would prefer to say, hyperprogression, then the epidemiological data would be there now, and it would be impossible to deny. By now, there would have been a worldwide wave of cancer correlating temporally and physically with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines across the globe. We see no such thing.

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This argument is basically: Ignore the lack of evidence supporting any of our speculations. We still think these biological mechanisms are plausible, and you should too, so much so that you should take our conclusions seriously:

The collective worldwide evidence from 2020–2025 underscores a biologically plausible connection between COVID-19 vaccination and cancer. The recurring clinical findings documented across many reports of de novo cancer onset, rapid tumor progression, viral reactivation, and reawakening of dormant disease, highlight critical gaps in knowledge and understanding of how large-scale immune changes produced by the vaccine interact with cancer biology.

Except that the whole review article is basically forced to admit that the collective worldwide evidence from 2020-2025 does not actually “underscore a biologically plausible connection between COVID-19 vaccination and cancer.” If it did, there would be at least some direct and compelling evidence implicating COVID-19 vaccines and cancer. There isn’t. Even Kuperwasser and El-Diery are forced to admit it.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here