Did RFK just take away your cancer treatment?

It starts with a little bump on your neck. You notice it when your hand brushes against it while you’re washing your hair, but at first you don’t pay it much attention. Then your spouse looks at your neck and asks you “What’s that?” It’s a little brown bump, maybe a mole. You think that maybe you should get it checked out by a dermatologist, but you forget to make an appointment, because work has just been so busy lately.

Then a few weeks later you look at the bump again, and it looks noticeably bigger. This time you call the dermatologist, but the soonest they can get you in is three weeks from now. By the time you’re in the doctor’s office, the bump is at least double the size it was when you noticed it. The doctor is tense and concerned, and he does a biopsy. Five days later you get the result over the phone: Melanoma.

“That’s cancer, right?” you ask, just to confirm, feeling something fall away in the pit of your stomach. “Yes,” the doctor’s assistant confirms. “That’s cancer.”

Cancer. The word is like the fall of an axe, cutting off the future you had imagined for yourself. Now instead, the days ahead are filled with surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, CT scans, MRIs. You will never again entirely be free of the eternal gnawing fear of discovering that the cancer has spread. Your hair is going to fall out, you’re going to go under the knife, you’re going to be weak and sick. You’re going to to read everything there is to read about cancer, and it still won’t help. It may go into remission, or you may die, but your life will never read the same.

This story reflects the sad reality of life for millions of Americans. Cancer is the second most common cause of death, just barely behind heart disease, killing over 600,000 every year. And every year, almost 2 million Americans are diagnosed with new cases of cancer. Some kinds, like prostate cancer, are usually manageable; others, like pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, are practically death sentences.

Now, there’s a common myth that cancer is an intractable disease that will never succumb to modern medicine. In 1971, President Richard Nixon launched the so-called “War on Cancer”; for many years, it was fashionable to say that cancer had won the war. But in fact, since around 1990, humanity has been making steady gains. Thanks to advances in early detection, screening, and various treatments, as well as the drop in smoking and a vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer, death rates have fallen at every age for almost every type of cancer. For a while this was masked by an increase in lung cancer from the smoking boom, but now that’s over too:

The problem is that since the population is growing steadily older, overall death rates are still higher than they were in Nixon’s day:

We’re delaying death from cancer, but not eliminating it.

In recent years, however, an explosion of new therapies has promised to accelerate our progress in treating the disease, changing the very nature of what it means to have cancer. The most promising of these are immunotherapies — medical techniques that use the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. And of those therapies, one of the most promising is mRNA vaccines.

Yes, mRNA vaccines — the same kind of technology that we used to vaccinate Americans against Covid during the pandemic. But it works a little differently. These mRNA cancer vaccines aren’t something that everyone takes in advance, to prevent themselves from getting cancer — instead, they’re a type of therapy that you take after you get diagnosed with the disease. Often, the vaccines are personalized, meaning that they develop a specific vaccine for your particular cancer.

mRNA vaccines, in combination with other therapies, promise to contain many cancers, turning them from a death sentence into a manageable, non-fatal disease. These vaccines are currently in development to fight all of the biggest killers: lung cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma. They’re even being used against glioblastoma, the most aggressive and common type of brain cancer. There are even some tantalizing results suggesting that mRNA could soon be used to create a universal cancer therapy.

Imagine how the story I told at the top of this post would go in an age of highly effective mRNA therapies. Instead of being sentenced to years of gut-wrenching fear, possibly followed by an agonizing death, someone diagnosed with cancer would simply sigh and realize that they would have to spend a bunch of money on treatments for the foreseeable future. That is the world toward which science is taking us.

And yet now all of this is in danger. The MAGA movement, which now holds near-absolute political power in America, has gone to war against mRNA technology. RFK Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and a prominent vaccine skeptics, just canceled a large amount of federal funding:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced this week it is beginning a "coordinated wind-down" of federally funded mRNA vaccine development.

This includes terminating awards and contracts with pharmaceutical companies and universities and canceling 22 investment projects worth nearly $500 million. While some final-stage contracts will be allowed to be completed, no new mRNA-based projects will be initiated, the HHS said.

Officially, all of the cancelled funding is supposedly for mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory illness — basically, Covid and anything that looks remotely like Covid. So officially, cancer research isn’t being cancelled — yet. But cancer researchers are terrified that this move will derail their whole field, and with good reason. The