For a long time, scientists have been working tirelessly to come up with vaccines against cancer. Significant progress is being registered in developing mRNA vaccines against cancer, but this progress has come up against a wall of misinformation that could thwart the prospects of this promising intervention.
Most people first heard about mRNA vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic when these vaccines were widely used to bring the pandemic under control. However, misinformation soon spread that these vaccines were not only accelerating cancer rates but also causing cancer to be “turbo-charged.” Social media was awash with stories of “turbo cancer” starting in 2021 and mainstream media caught on the following year.
Dannell Boatman, a researcher specializing in health communication who is also an assistant professor, writes that such misinformation quickly spreads and is believed for a variety of reasons. First, the people who spread this misinformation use language that sounds scientific, so the members of the public who come across this misinformation assume that the person spreading it is an authority on the subject.
Secondly, those who spread misinformation about mRNA vaccines use highly emotive language that is punctuated with anecdotes and personal experiences that lend a modicum of credibility to what they are saying. Such misinformation is particularly powerful if it comes at a time when public trust in health authorities is low and people are hungry for sources of information that they can trust.
Boatman explains that unfortunately, the pandemic provided the exact conditions that helped misinformation about turbo cancer to spread because public health officials weren’t communicating proactively during the pandemic and many made mistakes that were leveraged by those opposed to Covid vaccines.
Once misinformation takes root, it is very difficult to reverse what people believe because the false claims take on a life of their own and self-perpetuate.
Enormous strides have been made in the quest to develop viable mRNA vaccines against cancer. For example, at least 120 clinical trials hold promise in helping the scientific community combat cancer using these vaccines. One notable study shows mRNA vaccination can increase survival times in patients with glioblastoma by enabling the immune system to remain active inside the tumors and yet without this treatment, glioblastoma tumors couldn’t be reached by cancer-fighting immune cells.
According to Boatman, such progress is at risk of not being taken up by patients due to the infodemic about turbo cancer. Treatments can only be useful if the public is willing to use them, and the misinformation spreading about mRNA vaccines isn’t helping this promising field of research to reach its full potential.
Public health officials need to take on this threat and proactively feed the public the right information so that all proven treatment approaches can be leveraged in the fight against diseases like cancer. Today the misinformation infodemic could be targeting mRNA vaccines, tomorrow it could affect other therapy approaches like the fields in which companies like CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are active.
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