Health Wanted: Vampires

The Episode

Quick! Here’s a round of "kiss, marry, kill": Nosferatu, Lestat, and Count Chocula. This week on Health Wanted, we’re accessorizing with our best garlic necklaces and inviting everyone in to get up close and personal with the medical explanations for vampires.

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The Listener Questions

Can you explain the paper that says COVID vaccines cause cancer?

First things first: The paper in question is not actually a paper, it’s a letter to the editor. So, there's no way of knowing if it’s been peer reviewed or not, but I’d guess not.

I have seen some posts refer to this as proof that COVID vaccines cause “turbo cancer,” because the authors are only looking at the risk of a cancer diagnosis within a year of getting a COVID vaccine, and cancer takes longer than a year to develop–even in the case of people who developed cancers after being exposed to extreme amounts of radiation from the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan. It took more than a year for those cancers to develop. So if the COVID vaccines caused cancer in less than a year, I guess they would be turbo cancers. But they don’t. So they’re not. And also “turbo cancer” doesn’t exist. 

The paper says that it used data from the national health insurance of South Korea to look at if there was a difference in rates of cancer diagnoses in people who were vaccinated vs unvaccinated, one year after COVID vaccination. And wouldn’t you know it, they found increased risk of thyroid, colorectal, lung, prostate, gastric, and breast cancer in the vaccinated population.

Now, unlike the U.S., South Korea actually screens for all six of these cancers. The reason I said I did not think this was peer reviewed is because, if I was a peer reviewer, I would wonder if the authors did anything to control for the fact that people who follow vaccine recommendations likely also follow cancer screening recommendations, and would therefore be more likely to have their cancers detected. 

The authors of this paper did not control for screening intensity or family history of cancers.

Also, nearly 90% of Korean adults were vaccinated by October of 2021. If there was an increase in cancer after a year you would expect to see a significant increase in cancer cases in 2022. But the age-adjusted incidence was lower in 2022 than it was in 2021. 

I’ve been seeing a lot of videos on social media about lawsuits against certain birth controls claiming they cause brain tumors. Is this real or just a scare tactic to get women off birth control?

The short version is that there is an increased risk of certain kinds of brain tumors in people who use a specific kind of birth control, but the overall risk is extremely low.

Basically, a study of over 100,000 women in France, over a 10 year period, found an increase in the risk of developing a meningioma when using certain kinds of progestogens, a class of hormone used in some birth controls. 

A meningioma is a slow-growing tumor that develops on the meninges, which are the layers of tissue that cover your brain and spinal cord. They’re the most common type of brain tumor, and they are typically benign and treatable. Many don’t cause symptoms, but some can press on areas of the brain and impact things like sight, smell, memory problems and even cause seizures.

One of the progestins that was associated with an increased risk was medroxyprogesterone acetate, which is also known as Depo-Provera, an injectable birth control that people get every three months. The absolute increase in the risk is very small. Like .04% of people getting meningioma in the Depo-Provera group vs .01% of people in the control group. But this finding has been replicated in other studies.

The court case is happening because there are arguments that Pfizer knew about the risk but didn’t disclose it. Pfizer says they tried to get the FDA to change the label but the FDA declined to do it. I don’t really know about the merits of the lawsuit, but yes, it does appear that this particular form of birth control has an increased, but still small, risk of developing these brain tumors.

You could make the argument that the health risks from pregnancy are much higher than the risk of meningioma from this form of birth control. But there are also a lot of birth controls out there that don’t have this associated risk, so there are options for alternatives.

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