“Turbo cancer” claims are back.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
It took just a few hours for devotees of the “Make America healthy again” movement to question former President Joe Biden’s prostate-cancer diagnosis. Tumors of the prostate are the most common serious malignancy identified in men: Even aggressive ones like Biden’s are diagnosed roughly 25,000 times a year in the United States. Although Biden’s condition is conventional, a certain segment of the public has been beguiled into blaming mainstream medicine for every unexpected death or health-related tragedy it comes across. The anti-vaccine community, including the group formerly led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spent years promoting the idea that mRNA vaccines for COVID regularly push tumors into overdrive. (Rare anecdotes aside, there is no evidence to support this fear.) Now, predictably, the claim is cropping up again on social media. “Prostate cancer takes years to metastasize to bone unless super aggressive or turbo cancer,” the Kennedy-endorsed physician Craig Wax suggested.
That an 82-year-old man who had aged out of prostate-cancer-screening tests has been found to have an advanced malignancy should not be surprising. In my experience as a doctor who diagnoses cancer, many tumors are discovered out of the blue. Prostate cancer in particular may not become apparent until an individual goes to his doctor with a minor complaint—in Biden’s case, urinary symptoms, according to the announcement—only to have further testing discover the worst. (Biden’s cancer isn’t curable; people with Stage 4 disease like his live for about three years on average—although the outlook is worse for men who are more than 80 years old.)
Cancer is an enigmatic disease, one that is simultaneously influenced by genetics, environment, personal habits, the aging process, and—not to be discounted—bad luck. But its muddled nature can be uncomfortable for those who share the view that nearly all sickness is preventable with virtuous behavior and a clean environment. According to Kennedy, the current leader of the U.S. health-care system, tumors are a product of not only the vaccines in our arms, but also the fluoride in our water, the toxins in our school lunches, the signals from our phones, and surely many other ubiquitous aspects of modernity. Indeed, in MAHA land, cancer is not just a misfortune, but a cover-up. Before he became health secretary, Kennedy ominously suggested that doctors might find its cause in the “places they dare not look.”
It’s not just Kennedy. Trump’s health-care team routinely draws from the logic of this wellness-paranoia complex. Last year, Marty Makary, who has since become the FDA commissioner, told a group of MAHA wellness influencers convened by Senator Ron Johnson that cancer is a consequence of “low-grade chronic inflammation” induced by a poisoned food supply. (Years ago, he also speciously declared that undetected medical errors were a leading cause of death.) Casey Means, Trump’s new nominee for surgeon general, has claimed that “the biggest lie in healthcare” is that high blood sugar, malignant tumors, and clogged arteries “are totally different diseases requiring separate doctors and pills for life.” The truth is “simpler than we are told,” she said. (Buy her book to find out what it is.) And Mehmet Oz, the former lifestyle guru and current Medicare administrator, recently informed Americans, “It’s your patriotic duty to be as healthy as you can. It’s our job to help you get there, make it easy to do the right things.” Never mind that you can do everything right and still get sick. (For now, none of the administration’s major health officials has weighed in on Biden’s diagnosis.)
Joe Biden is no stranger to tough luck. His son Beau died of a brain tumor at age 46 in 2015, leading to Biden’s participation in a government-funded “cancer moonshot” to combat the condition. The moonshot initiative was an old-fashioned approach to medicine, one that sought to ameliorate illness through advances in science and technology. RFK Jr. and his MAHA acolytes are naturally suspicious of this approach. Now their weird discomfort with disease—and their outré views on cancer in particular—is being refracted through a sea of false, indecent speculations. No, Biden’s cancer was not “courtesy of the mRNA shot.” One can only hope that the government’s bevy of vaccine skeptics will be able to resist the siren’s call to join in saying otherwise.
