In 1976, the federal government set out to vaccinate the whole country against a swine flu pandemic that never arrived. Around 45 million Americans rolled up their sleeves before neurologists started noticing something in the wards: a run of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an ascending paralysis in which the immune system turns on the body’s own nerves. The early official line was that the vaccine had nothing to do with it. The data said otherwise. By the time the program was halted, the excess worked out to roughly one extra case of paralysis for every 100,000 people vaccinated, small but solid enough to shut down the largest immunization push the country had ever attempted. A decade later neurologists were still fighting about it in print, in journal exchanges blunt enough to carry the title “Lies, Damn Lies, and…”

I bring up that episode because the shape of it, a safety signal, an institutional reflex to wave it off, and a slow grudging walk toward acknowledgment, is what played out again in a Senate hearing room on June 3. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations convened a hearing under a title that tells you how raw the fight has gotten: “Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research.” The easy move is to sort everyone into teams and stop reading there. The more useful one is to notice who sat at the center of it. Not an activist. The man who discovered one of the genes in your cancer-biology textbook.

The signal, stated honestly

Wafik El-Deiry directs the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown and holds an American Cancer Society research professorship. In 1993 he discovered p21, the first mammalian inhibitor of the enzymes that push a cell through division, and the gene the tumor suppressor p53 reaches for when it needs to slam the brakes. That paper is still the most-cited original research the journal Cell has ever run. Whatever you make of the hearing, this is not a fringe figure wandering in off the street.

In January he and Tufts’ Charlotte Kuperwasser published a review in Oncotarget that managed to be modest and incendiary in the same breath. It catalogued the case reports: 69 publications, 333 patients across 27 countries, describing cancers that appeared, recurred, or accelerated after COVID vaccination or infection. That “or infection” matters, because the review covers both and does not claim every one of those cases is vaccine-linked. The authors then sketched three ways such a thing might, in theory, happen: immune dysregulation through inflammatory signaling like IL-6 and TNF-α; spike protein interfering with the DNA-damage response and with p53 itself; and residual plasmid DNA left over from manufacturing, wrapped in the same lipid nanoparticles that ferry the vaccine into cells.

The El-Deiry review scope
69
publications reviewed
333
patients catalogued
27
countries represented
A modest but global signal – the kind of pattern that, in a functioning research environment, earns a proper prospective study. Source: Oncotarget (PMC) – Kuperwasser and El-Deiry (2026)

They were careful about what they were not claiming, and that caution is the whole point. The review states flatly that temporal association does not establish causation, that no study has shown the vaccine actually initiating a tumor, and that the findings are “epidemiologic associations warranting further study rather than evidence of vaccine-induced cancer risk.” Read that twice. This is not a man saying the shot gives you cancer. It is a senior scientist saying here is a signal, it is not proof, and somebody should run the study that would tell us which. That is how an honest inquiry is supposed to start.

The biggest dataset in the review cuts both ways at once. A South Korean cohort of 8.4 million people found significantly higher one-year rates of six cancers after vaccination: thyroid at a hazard ratio of 1.35, gastric, colorectal and breast in the same neighborhood, lung at 1.53, prostate at 1.69, where 1.0 would mean no excess at all. Then the authors do the responsible thing and undercut their own headline. A retrospective cohort like this cannot cleanly separate a true increase from a detection effect, because vaccinated people see doctors more, get scanned more, and more scanning turns up more cancer that was already sitting there. A one-year window is short for a disease that usually takes years to surface. The number is a reason to run the careful study. It is not the study.

How the institutions answered

So how did the system respond to a hypothesis that, by its own authors’ framing, was an invitation to go investigate? Mostly by making it harder to see. El-Deiry testified that the day the review went online, the journal’s website was knocked offline by what was described as a cyberattack, and that when he posted the findings to LinkedIn the platform pulled them down and flagged them as misinformation. Take those as his account; nobody has produced the server logs. But they are the back half of that hearing title, “Attacks on Scientific Publications,” and they did not come from nowhere.

Sabine Hazan, a gastroenterologist who ran early-treatment trials, testified that Springer Nature retracted her peer-reviewed papers after what she described as politically motivated pressure. The retractions are a matter of record. The motive is her reading of them, and worth holding at that arm’s length. Committee staff also pointed to three papers, used to justify federal vaccine policy, that have themselves since been retracted or placed under investigation. Across these cases the response to inconvenient work was less often a rebuttal in the literature than a removal from it.

The witnesses defending the vaccines made a serious case, and it deserves to be put plainly. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, testified that messenger RNA breaks down quickly in the body and does not integrate into a person’s DNA, and she pointed to MD Anderson data in which vaccinated lung-cancer patients on immunotherapy fared better, not worse. Ranking member Richard Blumenthal read the National Cancer Institute’s position into the record: no evidence the vaccines cause cancer, trigger recurrence, or speed its progression. On the narrow mechanism of vaccine mRNA splicing itself into your genome, Gralow stands on firm ground. That is hard for it to do, and the evidence it happens at any meaningful scale is thin.

But the phrase “no evidence” does two very different jobs, and they are easy to mistake for each other. Sometimes it means we looked hard and found nothing. Sometimes it means we have not looked. The study that would actually settle El-Deiry’s question, a large prospective cohort followed for years, with real access to the manufacturing-contamination issue, is the one nobody holding the budget seems eager to commission. What does exist, in volume, is an entire academic literature on monitoring social media and “debunking” vaccine dissent. We have built sharper tools for managing the question than for answering it.

The hearing had its anecdotes, and anecdotes are exactly that. Angus Dalgleish, a veteran oncologist, described a wave of relapses among previously stable cancer patients in early 2022, and likened the job of controlling where lipid nanoparticles travel in the body to herding cats. Clinical observation, not data, and an honest reader files it accordingly. But filing something as anecdote is meant to be the start of an investigation, not a license to delete the question.

None of this stayed in the hearing room. The footage moved fast across independent channels, including a widely shared walkthrough by the retired educator John Campbell, in part because the outlets that once chased vaccine-injury stories now tend to file them under settled. People are not pulling up a Senate subcommittee clip for entertainment. They are pulling it up because the institutions whose actual job is to investigate keep announcing the case closed.

Here is what I will be watching, and it is not the next viral clip. Whether a single well-funded, long-horizon cohort study gets commissioned to test this signal the way the swine flu signal was eventually, belatedly tested. And whether the next retraction arrives with a public, reproducible scientific reason attached, or just a quiet takedown. The lesson of 1976 was never that vaccines are poison. It was that a safety signal can be small, inconvenient, and correct all at once, and that an institution which answers one by deleting the data is telling you something about its own confidence. You do not beat a hypothesis by making it disappear. You beat it by doing the work.

Sources

  1. U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations – hearing page, “Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research” (June 3, 2026)
  2. Oncotarget (PMC) – Kuperwasser & El-Deiry, “COVID vaccination and post-infection cancer signals: Evaluating patterns and potential biological mechanisms” (Jan 2026)
  3. Biomarker Research (PMC) – “1-year risks of cancers associated with COVID-19 vaccination: a large population-based cohort study in South Korea”
  4. CDC – Guillain-Barré Syndrome and Vaccines (the 1976 swine flu excess, ~1 case per 100,000)
  5. CDC / Emerging Infectious Diseases – “Reflections on the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program”
  6. Just the News – coverage of the hearing, witness testimony, and the NCI/ASCO pushback
  7. Sen. Ron Johnson – official video release of the hearing
  8. Brown University, Legorreta Cancer Center – Wafik El-Deiry, director (credentials, p21 discovery)
  9. Children’s Health Defense – on the retraction of Sabine Hazan’s COVID-treatment studies
  10. Journal of Medical Internet Research – Wawrzuta et al., systematic review of antivaccine messaging and the “monitor and debunk” posture (2021)
  11. Archives of Neurology – “Swine Influenza Vaccine and Guillain-Barré Syndrome: Lies, Damn Lies, and…” (1986)