1y ago

The fact that people this stupid exist

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Vaccines are typically meant to protect against viruses or bacteria. Cancer is neither of those. hiv is a virus but the political will to produce effective treatments was not always there. I think a lot of young people underestimate the homophobia that was pervasive not all that long ago and how it was tied to the aids epidemic.
- There are some promising efforts for vaccines against cancer. It's teaching your immune system to kill cells that were supposed to die on their own. It's a relatively recent development, though.
  Plus, as should always be stated with cancer treatments, there is no singular "cancer". It's a class of related problems that need to be handled individually. Vaccine against prostate cancer shouldn't be expected to work against breast cancer. Anything that claims to cure cancer in a blanket way should be treated with great suspicion.
  
  The mrna vaccines that allowed us to quickly target covid were under development for targeting cancers. We all got super lucky to be honest.
  
  I mean also isn't the hpv vaccine kinda functionally a cancer vaccine
  
  Oh boy, that could also go horribly wrong too, what if a cell is a little bit removed in it's growth for some reason but would develop into a useful cell but, NOPE body killed it.
  
  It could, but it's also improving on something your immune system already does. Out of all the trillions of cells undergoing division in your body all the time, a few of them go cancerous each and every day. Your immune system almost always takes them out. It's the one time out of a bajilion that things go wrong.

264 comments