Websites and high-profile anti-vaccine activists are seizing on recently released U.S. government statistics showing a rise in cancers among young people to claim that COVID vaccines are responsible for the troubling trend.
… On April 22, the National Cancer Institute released its most recent national cancer statistics, which cover the period between 2000 and 2023. The data indicate a rise in all cancers among people in the U.S. under 50, called “early-onset” cancers.
In seeking to connect the spike in cancer to COVID vaccines, some anti-vaxxers used the data to calculate that from 2021 to 2023 — a period during which COVID vaccines were widely available — the cancer rate increased by 6.37 percent.
The increase in cancer rates cannot be linked to the rollout of COVID vaccines in the 2020s.
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“There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer, lead to recurrence, or lead to disease progression,” the National Cancer Institute states on its website. Indeed, the upward trends in cancer diagnoses predate COVID vaccines, which began to be rolled out in December 2020, the National Cancer Institute and other health authorities and experts have noted.
