Angus Dalgleish, the British oncologist who has spent four decades chasing immune mechanisms in melanoma, told the subcommittee about six of his long-stable stage-4 patients who relapsed inside six weeks of one another in late 2021. They had one variable in common, and it was not their tumors. Each had, in the weeks before the relapse, taken a booster.
That clinic observation, made in London nearly five years ago, was the one Ron Johnson pulled into a hearing room on June 3. The chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations convened seven witnesses to discuss “plausible mechanisms of COVID-19 injections causing cancer and attacks on scientific publications and research.” The wording was careful: plausible mechanisms instead of proven cause, attacks on publications instead of contested findings. Both halves were the same story, and Johnson was the first chair willing to seat them in the same room.
The data anchor under the hearing is a population study out of South Korea, published in Biomarker Research last September, that linked records from 8.4 million people in the national insurance database to one-year cancer incidence after vaccination. The headline number was a 27 percent higher overall cancer risk in the vaccinated cohort, with elevated signals for thyroid, gastric, colorectal, lung, breast, and prostate. By the time Johnson opened the hearing on June 3, the paper had carried a Springer editorial expression of concern for more than seven months, posted on October 22 with the standard language about issues raised with the editors and an investigation that would take as long as it took.
The witness list was selected to demonstrate the same pattern at the level of individual careers, where a researcher publishes, the journal flags the paper, the stated grounds arrive narrow and procedural, and the citation does less work than it did the week before.
Sabine Hazan, who runs the genomics lab ProgenaBiome and spent the pandemic sequencing stool samples, testified that her lab had documented a measurable and persistent drop in gut Bifidobacterium after mRNA injection, a genus that does immune work the body cannot easily replace. Retraction Watch counted four of her papers retracted by Springer Nature and Frontiers as of last July. The grounds Springer cited included protocol discrepancies, problems with ethics documentation, inconsistencies in the stated study period, and concerns about inclusion criteria; some of the retractions landed years after publication. Hazan agreed to none of them. Whatever a reader thinks of her science, the papers were citable until they were not.
Dalgleish himself walked the room through three mechanisms the field has been arguing about on preprint servers without much oxygen in the medical press. The first was contamination: residual plasmid DNA in vials, including SV40 promoter and enhancer sequences from the manufacturing template, identified in certain lots by independent sequencing.
The second was a proposed shift in the antibody class profile after repeated boosters, from protective IgG3 toward immunosuppressive IgG4, the kind of class switch normally seen in allergen tolerance and which, if it generalizes, would dial down the immune system’s surveillance on rogue cells. The third was T-cell exhaustion in the heavily boosted cohort. None of this is, on its own, proof that an injection caused a specific cancer. Each is a biologically specific path from the same starting point to the same kind of bad ending, and the people who have spent careers tracing those paths were the ones asked to testify.
Wafik El-Deiry, who runs the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown and built his career on the p53 tumor-suppression pathway, spent his time on how spike protein and post-vaccination case reports have been treated by reviewers, PubPeer threads, and grant committees, the kind of professional consequences that have made the question expensive to ask. Saskia Mostert, the Dutch pediatric oncologist, brought the European data. Aseem Malhotra, the cardiologist who turned against the rollout in 2022 after his father’s sudden death, brought the campaigner’s edge. Tamika Felder, a cervical cancer survivor, closed the panel for the patient side of the ledger, which is what the hearing existed to acknowledge.
Across the aisle, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the senior Democrat on the subcommittee, leaned on the National Cancer Institute’s position that there is no established link, and Julie Gralow, the chief medical officer of the Association for Clinical Oncology, gave the establishment its line: no clinical evidence proves causation, cancers develop over many years, vaccination cuts hospitalization, and cancer patients who get COVID do better when vaccinated. It was a competent statement of the consensus. It was also delivered the morning a Springer journal still had an open notice posted on the largest cohort study anyone had cited at the question.
What Johnson held on June 3 is not a closed case against the injections. It is an opened one, in a room the captured agencies do not control, with witnesses whose findings keep coming back marked. The chair did not bring a verdict. He brought a paper trail. The proposed mechanisms are specific enough to test. The population signal is too large to wave away. And the answer keeps arriving, when it arrives, on a journal page rather than at a registry. The hearing’s other half, the part about attacks on scientific publications, is the part the next chair will inherit whether the agencies cooperate or not.
Related coverage: the mechanism testimony from the same hearing, and why the room it was held in mattered.
Sources
- Senate HSGAC – Hearing: Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research (June 3, 2026)
- Biomarker Research – 1-year risks of cancers associated with COVID-19 vaccination: a large population-based cohort study in South Korea (2025)
- Retraction Watch – Microbiome company CEO Sabine Hazan: fourth retraction (2025)
- International Business Times – US Senate hearing on COVID vaccines and cancer links
- YouTube – COVID injections and cancer hearing