A HEADLINE declaring ‘Severe Covid-19 Linked to Higher Lung Cancer Risk’ has popped up in Global Health NOW (GHN). The entry provides a link to the European Medical Journal(EJM), which is not a conventional academic medical journal but a digest of studies published in various academic medical journals.
The EJM article makes much of an observation that preventing severe covid infection could reduce the risk of lung cancer. Note the word ‘could’ which, as is so often, does a lot of heavy lifting there. Of course, the recommended course of action to prevent severe covid infection is covid vaccination, to which I will return.
Therefore, the claim made in GHN is a snippet based on an already abbreviated report of a full study published elsewhere. This original study was published in Cell, and a pre-print of the article is available on bioRχiv. It is important to note that the data were gathered during 2020-2021.
As so often is the case with anything linked to GHN, which tends to provide links to articles sensationalising anything covid-related, the reporting in the EJM article is selective. It exaggerates the risk of lung cancer related to Covid-19 and omits to report a finding from the Cell pre-print, which runs counter to the message they are trying to convey.
Thus, an important sentence in the Cell pre-print is ignored. The sentence says: ‘Patients who experienced severe Covid-19, defined by hospitalisation, had a modest elevated risk of developing all cancer types overall, but diminished incidence in male prostate cancer and female breast cancer.’
So, the risk of developing cancer is low and having severe covid seems to be protective against two forms of cancer, prostate and breast cancer, which are the major forms of cancer in men and women, respectively. That seems like good news to me.
Should we be worried about the increased risk of other forms of cancer? In the light of all we now know about covid and covid vaccines, probably not, provided we make sensible decisions. Primary among those decisions is not being injected with covid vaccines.
The Cell study has two aspects to it. In part it is a study of 44,229,908 older adults who had covid. The size of the study is impressive, but the study is retrospective and, importantly, there is no consideration of covid vaccination status of the participants. Also, were these people hospitalised with covid or because of it?
They may have been lucky enough to get into hospital during the mad covid years and then tested positive for covid. And we know well how prone the covid tests were to the generation of false positive results. Frankly, some of these people may not even have had covid.
This is an important omission, especially in the light of oncologist Professor Angus Dalgleish’s work, and subsequent work showing that there is a link between covid vaccines and cancer. It is also important in the light of an unrelated stream of work by pathologist Dr Clare Craig who demonstrates that receiving a covid vaccine paradoxically increases the likelihood of becoming infected with covid.
Ironically, therefore, being vaccinated with a covid vaccine leads to a greater likelihood of having covid which, if it becomes ‘severe’, may slightly increase your likelihood of developing some forms of cancer.
What of the claims regarding the protective effect of the covid vaccine against developing cancer? The data related to this claim did not come from the part of the study of human participants in the Cell pre-print. They came from a study of mice and, as we all know, mice are not humans.
Finally, there is no acknowledgement in either the EJM digest or the Cell pre-print of another major possible explanation for the claims related to increased cancer risk and covid infection. As referred to above, the data were gathered during 2020-2021. This was at the height of the covid event insanity.
Lockdowns were enacted, hospitals were effectively closed and screening services for cancer were unavailable. Even the multi-million pound and extremely elongated UK Covid-19 Inquiry has admitted that these measures probably cost thousands of lives.
It seems logical in retrospect, and it seemed logical at the time, that if you stop access to cancer screening for a period, then you are likely to see a higher incidence of cancer during that period. And we did.
What the explanation for the reduced incidence of prostate and breast cancer could be is hard to fathom. One thing is clear, however: selective reporting cuts both ways. If an association between covid and increased cancer risk is deemed newsworthy, then so too should be any signal suggesting the opposite. But we are unlikely to see a link in GHN or the left-leaning media proclaiming that ‘infection with covid lowers your risk of cancer’.
