Yeah, Just Like the Flu

It turns out that the Covid pandemic has corresponded with an explosion of atypical cancers, either rare cancers becoming more prevalent, or less rare cancers occurring at freakishly young ages.

I know, correlation is not causation, but we know that Covid messes with the circulatory system, which plays an integral role in cancer development, and that it can cause immune dysregulation, which also plays an integral role in cancer development.

Under any other circumstance, this would be the subject of extensive research and analysis by doctors and entities like the CDC, but because aggressively enforced omerta in the interest of a return to, "Normalcy," we hear crickets:

Kashyap Patel looked forward to his team’s Friday lunches. All the doctors from his oncology practice would gather in the open-air courtyard under the shadow of a tall magnolia tree and catch up. The atmosphere tended to the lighthearted and optimistic. But that week, he was distressed.

It was 2021, a year into the coronavirus pandemic, and as he slid into a chair, Patel shared that he’d just seen a patient in his 40s with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and lethal cancer of the bile ducts that typically strikes people in their 70s and 80s. Initially, there was silence, and then one colleague after another said they’d recently treated patients who had similar diagnoses. Within a year of that meeting, the office had recorded seven such cases.

“I’ve been in practice 23 years and have never seen anything like this,” Patel, CEO of Carolina Blood and Cancer Care Associates, later recalled. Asutosh Gor, another oncologist, agreed: “We were all shaken.”

There was other weirdness, too: multiple patients contending with multiple types of cancer arising almost simultaneously, and more than a dozen new cases of other rare cancers.

Increasingly, Patel was left with an unsettling thought: Could the coronavirus be inflaming the embers of cancer?

The uptick in aggressive, late-stage cancers since the dawn of the pandemic is confirmed by some early national data and a number of large cancer institutions. Many experts have mostly dismissed the trend as an expected consequence of disruptions to health care that began in 2020.

An uptick in mortality as a result of disruptions to the healthcare system might explain some things, but these sort of cancer outbreaks don't just happen because you could not get an appointment to see your doctor.

Virally induced cancers are a proven phenomenon.  It's why you see the push for HPV vaccines, for example.

………

[Director of the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory David] Tuveson said a number of small and early studies — many of which have been published within the past nine months — suggests that coronavirus infection can induce an inflammatory cascade and other responses that, in theory, could exacerbate the growth of cancer cells.

Tuveson said a number of small and early studies — many of which have been published within the past nine months — suggests that coronavirus infection can induce an inflammatory cascade and other responses that, in theory, could exacerbate the growth of cancer cells.

He has wondered whether it could be more akin to an environmental stressor — like tobacco, alcohol, asbestos or microplastics.

“Covid wrecks the body, and that’s where cancers can start,” Tuveson said, explaining how autopsy studies of people who died of covid-19 showed prematurely aged tissue.

Yea, it's just the flu.

Bullsh%$.