I Want A New Drug. A Vaccine Even. And A Functioning FDA, CDC, NIH, Etc…

from the one-that-won’t-make-me-nervous-about-prematurely-dying dept

My cancer is back. This is disappointing but not unexpected; of the 2/3 of people who survive their first bout with ovarian cancer, 80% usually have it recur at some point. For me it was sooner than expected, and disheartening because, even if I beat it back this time, it will likely come back again and again at shorter and shorter intervals. On the other hand, it took long enough that I’m still considered “platinum sensitive” and eligible for treatment with platinum-based drugs, which are currently among the most effective for this cancer. Unfortunately, over time the cancer becomes resistant to it, which makes it very difficult to treat, let alone cure once and for all, and those treatments themselves are fairly caustic and difficult for the rest of the body to endure.

Fortunately there has been some exciting science happening, not just for my cancer but all cancers, to find treatments that, separately or in combination, are more effective, longer lasting, and less toxic in their side effects. For instance, some drugs are being developed that can look for certain characteristics of tumors and then deliver a chemo payload only to cells that have that characteristic, which is more likely to be just be the nefarious malignant ones, thus sparing as many of the rest of the body’s cells as possible the chemo toxicity.  For ovarian cancer in particular, which is especially intractable, some drugs find ways to reset the platinum sensitivity so that standard treatments can work effectively again. Others try to defeat the mechanisms themselves that make the cancer so entrenched.

And then there are therapies aimed at getting the immune system on board to help the body rid itself of these nefarious cells. Immune systems spend their days attacking things that don’t belong in healthy bodies, and yet cancers happen because for some reason they can’t manage to recognize or deal with certain cells, which then run amok. So there are a variety of modalities being looked at to help bodies do a better job of hunting these cells down and destroying them before they can get entrenched. Sometimes these therapies involve drugs with direct effects on tumor cells or the tumor cell environment in a way that will deter their proliferation. Other times it’s a therapy designed to reprogram the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy the bad cells, like through T-cell therapy, or, by working with the body’s own “natural killer” cells, which tend to do a better job of remembering the threat and staying on guard against it. And then there are a variety of vaccine possibilities, including some using mRNA technology, all of which are designed to do for an immune system what a vaccine is always designed to do: teach it what a danger looks like and give it what it needs to fight it, ideally without all this extra poison, and hopefully once and for all.

It is, in some ways, a very exciting time to be a cancer patient. Cancer is already not what it used to be, and even for my extremely lethal one I was happy to discover last year that a late-stage diagnosis did not automatically mean a death sentence—at least not right away. But it is also terrifying. Every patient is in a race with the science to hang on long enough to benefit from the fruit of these discoveries. Someday we may all be saved, but will our own rescue come in time?

And now, here in 2025, it is even more terrifying. Because while on the one hand we stand on the precipice of finally being able to tame this monster, we have the US government making the affirmative choice to let the cancer win.

The cuts in funding closing labs may be closing down the very science that was going to save the person you know and love. The hysteria maligning vaccines moreover threatens to close down some of the most promising avenues for delivering real cures. Meanwhile a politicized FDA stands to slow approvals for new trials and treatments. And a CDC that no longer can be trusted to control disease only gives aid and comfort to the pathogens that would seek to ultimately kill us all.

And for women’s cancers in particular, a politicized public health system that deems the specific science of our bodies to be icky and criminal deprives us of all sorts of avenues for treatment and cures. There is evidence, for instance, that abortifacients like mifepristone can defeat the mechanism that makes our ovarian cancers so resistant to treatment, because it may be the same mechanism that protects pregnancies that is now misfiring to protect our tumor cells. And yet, there is currently little science exploring this vector of opportunity because how can there be? That science is all but illegal. As nearly all science is now becoming.

Mankind has made enormous strides in understanding the science of the human body, down to an even molecular level. We increasingly understand how to maintain the health of these amazing walking chemistry sets that somehow manage to spark into souls. And yet this government would damn us back to the days when all we had were leeches and deity beseeches, thanks to a hostility to science that is a hostility to life itself. The gift civilization has given us, of being able to control our own medical destiny, has been cast aside by this government. And it means that people will die—needlessly, avoidably, and heartbreakingly.

No claim of controlling “waste” could possibly justify what the Trump Administration has done. The true waste is measured not just in lost science and aborted research but in the lives that will be needlessly lost with it, including the lives of everyone who could be using their own lifeforce to make this world better if they weren’t having to succumb to diseases we are capable of abating. The cost of these policy decisions far, far exceeds any supposed “savings” these misanthropic policies pretend to offer. There is absolutely nothing of value that these cretinous, gleefully ignorant anti-science policies could possibly hope to gain, and there is so much hope to be lost if they are not soon reversed so that we can once again have the world class public health system that we first met the 21st century with.

If they are not, and soon, I fear my own life will be doomed. And so will we be all.

Filed Under: cancer, cdc, fda, health and human services, research, therapy, vaccines