Covid jabs could help fight cancer, according to a landmark new study published this week. The journal Nature has revealed that mRNA vaccines used to treat Covid-19 may prolong the lives of people with cancer who took them, compared to those who went unvaccinated, according to an analysis of medical records.
Nature reported that follow up studies with mice show that the vaccines have the “apparent life extending effect” because they “rev up the body’s immune system.” “The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine acts like a siren and activates the immune system throughout the entire body”, including inside the tumour, where it “starts programming a response to kill the cancer”, says Adam Grippin, a radiation oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and co-author of the report published in Nature.
He added: “We were amazed at the results in our patients.”
Researchers analysed the medical records of more than 1,000 people with lung cancer or melanoma. They found that those with a certain type of lung cancer who received an mRNA Covid vaccine were linked to a “near doubling in survival time”, from 21 months to 37 months.
Nature reports: “Unvaccinated people with metastatic melanoma survived an average of 27 months; by the time data collection ended, vaccinated people had survived so long that the researchers couldn’t calculate an average survival time. People whose tumours had traits hinting that they were unlikely to respond to checkpoint inhibitors saw the biggest survival boost after vaccination.”
Benoit Van den Eynde, a tumour immunologist at the University of Oxford, said: “I did not expect the effect to be that significant, and the data are very strong.”
Nature adds: “This survival benefit was not seen with vaccines that do not use mRNA technology, such as those for influenza and pneumonia, or in people who received a different type of cancer therapy.”