A Top Cancer Researcher Logged 333 Tumor Reports After COVID Shots and Infection. Now He Wants the Study the Agencies Won't Fund.

For about three years I filed “turbo cancer” in the same drawer as chemtrails and colloidal silver. It sounded built for a Telegram channel: tumors supposedly detonating out of nowhere, pinned on the shots, with nothing under the word but vibes. So let me be honest about where I started, because the thing that finally moved me was not a podcast. It was a byline.

Wafik El-Deiry is not a fringe figure. He runs a cancer lab at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, and he is one of the people who worked out how the p53 tumor-suppressor pathway stops a damaged cell from turning malignant. When a scientist like that co-authors a paper taking the post-COVID cancer reports seriously, rolling your eyes is the wrong reflex. Reading the paper is the right one.

So I read it. In January, El-Deiry and Charlotte Kuperwasser of Tufts published a review in Oncotarget that pulled together 69 publications describing 333 individual patients across 27 countries, every case a cancer diagnosis, a recurrence, or an unusually fast progression reported after COVID vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infection between 2020 and 2025. The patterns were not random noise. Nearly half the reports, 43 percent, were lymphoid malignancies, the lymphomas and leukemias; another 41 percent were solid tumors. And the tumors kept clustering somewhere specific: at or near the deltoid where the needle went in, in the axilla, in the draining lymph nodes, sometimes with a swollen node and a solid-tumor metastasis showing up together.

A pile of case reports is not proof, and I will come back to that, hard, because it matters. But I could not slide this back into the crank drawer, because the biology underneath it is not invented. It is mechanism I already knew, pointed somewhere I had not wanted to look.

Start with the one that genuinely unsettled me: IgG4. Get an ordinary vaccine and your body makes inflammatory antibodies, the IgG1 and IgG3 that tag an invader for destruction. Hit the immune system with the same antigen over and over, though, and it can switch to making IgG4, the antibody your body uses to calm itself down, the one that shows up in beekeepers so they stop reacting to stings. A 2023 study in Science Immunology tracked exactly this in people getting repeated mRNA doses. After the second shot, IgG4 made up about 0.04 percent of their spike-specific antibodies. After the third, it climbed to roughly 19 percent. In people who then caught COVID on top of the shots, it reached 40 to 80 percent. And those IgG4 antibodies were worse at triggering the immune system’s cleanup crews, the phagocytosis and complement that clear flagged cells.

Wait. Why would any of that touch cancer? That is where I put the paper down. Your immune system does not only hunt viruses. It runs constant surveillance on your own cells that have turned malignant and clears them before you ever feel a thing. Nobody has shown that vaccine-driven IgG4 blunts that surveillance, and I want to be exact here: the Science Immunology team measured weaker antibody function, not missed tumors. But if repeated dosing nudges the whole system toward tolerance, toward stand down, this one is fine, the honest question is what else it decides to tolerate. That is a hypothesis. It is also very much testable.

The same molecule, opposite instruction

This is the paradox I keep turning over. The exact same molecule, mRNA, is one of the most promising cancer treatments in the pipeline right now. Researchers are building mRNA vaccines that train the immune system to attack tumors, and the early work in gastrointestinal and other cancers looks genuinely good. So why would one platform read as protective in one setting and worrying in another? Context is the whole answer. A therapeutic cancer vaccine is engineered to aim the immune system at a specific tumor and scream attack. Repeated spike dosing, given to healthy people as prevention, may be quietly teaching the opposite lesson. Same chemistry, opposite instruction.

The review does not stop at antibodies. It walks through spike protein that, by its account, can persist in tissue for weeks, months, even years, and that under oxidative stress appears to disrupt the very p53 and DNA-damage pathways El-Deiry spent his career mapping. “Chronic exposure to an agent with biological activity that disrupts cell cycle and DNA damage response pathways could represent a novel etiological factor to cancer,” the authors write. They flag residual manufacturing DNA that several independent assessments put over recognized limits, wrapped in the same lipid nanoparticles that are very good at carrying genetic material into your cells, along with leftover SV40 regulatory sequences that, dropped into the genome, can switch on nearby genes. None of that is settled. All of it is testable. Most of it is untested.

Flag the finding, skip the study

Then there is the population signal, where the establishment’s posture gets hard to defend. A South Korean cohort of 8.4 million people reported higher one-year cancer incidence among the vaccinated, and the hazard ratios were not trivial: 1.69 for prostate, 1.53 for lung, 1.28 for colorectal, with thyroid, gastric, and breast also raised. An Italian cohort of roughly 300,000 and a US military analysis of 1.3 million service members fed similar signals into the review. Now the honest weakness, because you deserve it: these are observational datasets, they carry every confounder observational datasets carry, the Korean authors themselves wrote that residual confounding, detection bias, and limited follow-up preclude causal inference, and the military authors declined to pin their roughly 50 percent jump in certain lymphoma subtypes on either vaccination or infection. Fair. But watch the shape of the institutional reflex. The move is always to caveat the finding, never to fund the one clean study that would end the argument.

The most damning line in the whole review is not an accusation. It is an admission the authors make about all of us: current reliable epidemiologic data is lacking to provide evidence that vaccination does not increase population-level cancer incidence. Read that twice. Nearly five years and billions of doses in, the review’s own authors cannot point you to the study that clears the vaccine. They can only tell you it has not been done. That is the same institutional muscle memory that told you natural immunity did not count and the lab leak was a conspiracy: caveat first, investigate never, and treat the people asking the question as the problem.

This is the gap Angus Dalgleish, the emeritus oncology chair who spent decades in cancer immunotherapy, has been hammering, in written testimony to the US Senate and in a long conversation with John Campbell that pushed the topic back in front of a mass audience this week. His claim is not that the shots give you cancer. It is narrower and harder to wave off: repeated boosting may blunt the immune surveillance that keeps existing malignancy in check, and the people positioned to run the forensic studies keep deciding not to. That is testimony and opinion, not a second dataset, and I am keeping it in its lane.

Let me be clear about the floor, because it is the floor. No study has shown an mRNA shot causing a tumor. No animal model has reproduced it. Case reports cannot prove causation no matter how high you stack them, and El-Deiry frames his own catalog as hypothesis-generating, not evidence of vaccine-induced cancer. I am not going to inflate what 333 case reports and a handful of messy cohorts can carry.

But hypothesis-generating is not nothing. It is the phrase scientists reach for right before somebody finally runs the experiment. The scandal would not be that the question exists. The scandal is that a p53 authority had to publish a plea for “rigorous epidemiologic, longitudinal, clinical, histopathological, forensic, and mechanistic studies” because, all this time, nobody with the budget and the mandate has bothered to look.

So this is my conclusion. I am not going to tell you what to put in your body. But if my own oncologist waved this away as pure conspiracy, I would find a different oncologist, and I would keep asking the one question the agencies still will not answer out loud: where is the study that actually looks?

Sources

1. Oncotarget – Kuperwasser & El-Deiry, review of cancer reports after COVID vaccination or infection (2026)
2. Science Immunology – Irrgang et al., IgG4 class switch after repeated SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination (2023)
3. Biomarker Research – 1-year cancer risks after COVID-19 vaccination, South Korea cohort of 8.4 million (2025)
4. US Senate HSGAC – Angus Dalgleish, written testimony on vaccination and cancer recurrence
5. Cells – mRNA vaccines as immunotherapy in gastrointestinal cancers (2026)
6. Dr. John Campbell with Prof. Angus Dalgleish – mRNA and new cancers (YouTube)