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What is it that makes cancer patients at higher risk? Is it the cancer itself or is it treatments for cancer? And if it’s the treatments, which treatments make patients more vulnerable?

The people who are at risk for contracting the disease are people who have a lowered immune system. Now that lowered immune system can sometimes come about because of cancer treatment. Say people who have solid tumors, colorectal cancer, or breast cancer, their immune system is relatively intact. When we start giving them chemotherapy, their immune system is damaged. One of the side effects of treating the cancer. People have lymphoma and leukemia on the other hand, that’s a cancer of the immune system. Their immune system has a problem to begin with. So the approach to coronavirus should be different between the two. We have a lot of data to show that people who have leukemia, especially who get coronavirus are more likely to have bad outcomes. Most people do well, but they’re more likely to have bad outcomes compared to the people who have solid tumor disease. People who have solid tumor disease who are cured are at essentially the same risk as people who are of the same age and basic health. And the people who have treatment. Now, people who are getting treated with drugs that specifically target B cells that make immunoglobulin are at especially higher risk for Coronavirus. B cell treatments are common in leukemia and lymphoma.

What do you say to people who are hesitant to take the vaccine and concerned that they were approved so quickly?

Yeah, well, the education, I think is the most important part and folks who are hesitant to get the vaccine while I respect their hesitancy, I’ll tell them, everyone that I talked to who’s gotten the vaccine is of the belief that getting COVID is far worse. They haven’t talked to people who’ve gotten COVID. Getting COVID is far worse than getting the vaccine. Now that being said, there’s a lot of people say, how is it that this vaccine was the virus was discovered last December of 2019, we had a vaccine candidate by May of 2020, and now we’re giving it, you said 19 million people have gotten both vaccinations complete? Well, let me explain. It didn’t take six months to develop that vaccine. It took 50 years. Those of us who work in the world of cancer and oncology should be able to understand much of the science that went into developing the vaccine and understanding this disease were things that were developed in the war on cancer.

And it’s very much related to Richard Nixon signing the National Cancer Act in 1971. You know, the fact that we had a problem and, a problem in China, within 45 days and realizing that problem in China, they published for the world on the internet, the RNA sequence. The fact that we use these messenger RNA viruses, those were developed 20 years ago in cancer work. Some of the drugs, the recombinant DNA, the Remdesivir, I’m sorry, recombinant antibodies, the remdesivir to block replication. These were all things that were all developed out of cancer work. And so one could really say it took a long time to develop the vaccine. A lot of the work was done well before we actually knew there was a virus out there. And I’ve looked at the studies, the studies have been done very, very well. There’s an argument that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been researched better than most that are FDA approved.