Comment on The fact that people this stupid exist
artvandelay@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Vaccines are typically meant to protect against viruses or bacteria. Cancer is neither of those. hiv is a virus but the political will to produce effective treatments was not always there. I think a lot of young people underestimate the homophobia that was pervasive not all that long ago and how it was tied to the aids epidemic.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
There are some promising efforts for vaccines against cancer. It’s teaching your immune system to kill cells that were supposed to die on their own. It’s a relatively recent development, though.
Plus, as should always be stated with cancer treatments, there is no singular “cancer”. It’s a class of related problems that need to be handled individually. Vaccine against prostate cancer shouldn’t be expected to work against breast cancer. Anything that claims to cure cancer in a blanket way should be treated with great suspicion.
legion02@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The mrna vaccines that allowed us to quickly target covid were under development for targeting cancers. We all got super lucky to be honest.
Kimano@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean also isn’t the hpv vaccine kinda functionally a cancer vaccine
ph00p@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh boy, that could also go horribly wrong too, what if a cell is a little bit retarded in it’s growth for some reason but would develop into a useful cell but, NOPE body killed it.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
It could, but it’s also improving on something your immune system already does. Out of all the trillions of cells undergoing division in your body all the time, a few of them go cancerous each and every day. Your immune system almost always takes them out. It’s the one time out of a bajilion that things go wrong.