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Do vaccines increase the risk of cancer over a lifetime?

The Claim:

Former radiologist William Makis claims that we will see a “tsunami” of cancer cases among children in the next 5-10 years due to COVID vaccines. He cites a tweet that claims FDA documents support these assertions.

The Facts:

It’s important to check the sources you find and not take them at face value. First, the tweet offers only screenshots and no links. But we found the links.

The source, it turns out, is a slide deck that discusses vaccine monitoring. Those same slides explain that one of the limitations of these monitoring programs is that they cannot tell us whether or not a vaccine was a cause of the reported adverse events.

The other source is from here, a 2006 document (long before mRNA vaccines were available) specifically talking about gene therapy. As the document isn’t about mRNA COVID vaccines, and mRNA vaccines are NOT gene therapy, he may as well have posted a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, as neither has anything to do with the subject at hand.

Disclaimer: Science is always evolving and our understanding of these topics may have evolved too since this was originally posted. Be sure to check out our most recent posts and browse the latest Just the Facts Topics for the latest.

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