A little over five years ago, I wrote a post about Moderna’s amazing success developing the Covid vaccine, which was instrumental in finally taming the worldwide pandemic. I used a Harvard Business School case to explain that mRNA was much more than simply a traditional vaccine. As a Moderna scientist put it in the case study I quoted from: “Moderna, and other companies that followed, took the use of mRNA to the next level by turning it into a drug. Following this logic, once an externally manufactured mRNA was injected into the body as a drug, the ribosomes in the cells read the injected mRNA like a code and made the protein the mRNA instructed them to make, thus leveraging the power of mRNA for the targeted production of proteins needed to fight diseases. mRNA functioned like a software instruction manual, instructing the body how to produce its own drugs.” (And the process didn’t mess with a cell’s DNA.)

The reaction of blog readers here? Probably 80% or more of the 60-plus who commented were negative on my report. No big surprise. I doubt many read it through; they saw I had made positive comments about a vaccine and stopped reading. And likely little has changed over the last five years, even though the newest Moderna vaccine, which got lots of press last week, was targeting cancer, a disease that strikes millions of Americans, young and old, each year.

Last week’s report was about a vaccine for melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer, which kills about six per cent of its victims, and keeps survivors in fear for the rest of their lives after trestment that it will return in a fatal form.  In one quick online survey I saw on X, an outspoken MAGA supporter , Gunther Eagleman, asked his readers if they would take a proven cancer vaccine that became available right now. Not surprisingly, it was about 70% no and 30% yes—about what my comments suggested five years ago.

Anyway, I was encouraged by the mainstream media coverage of this major development. One article profiles a man who participated in the FDA melanoma trial, which was designed to test if the cancer could be prevented from recurring, as it commonly does. The man profiled was pretty candid about both the severity of the skin cancer he had (requiring disfiguring surgery on his face), and the side effects of the vaccine (similar to the first covid vaccines).

Another article profiles a young mother who grew up in a family that refused to allow the children to be vaccinated; she didn’t receive her first vaccine until she was 23, and on her way to becoming an immunologist. The article does a nice job of tracing the woman’s arduous journey, and how she maintained a sense of compassion and understanding toward antivaxxers she continues to come in contact with, including her own mother.  

And finally, this from The Wall Street Journal, about Moderna’s long twisting journey from success to despair (thanks partly to RFKJr’s sabotage), and finally to apparent success in getting through the FDA’s testing process, to the brink of approval; and also, how it is testing other cancer vaccines, for pancreatic, kidney, and lung cancers, all of which have been death sentences over the years.

I personally find all this quite amazing. I suspect more Americans will come around to support this mRNA approach for preventing cancer, simply because it is so much more targeted and predictable and less toxic than anything else we have (mainly chemotherapy). One of the reasons people have become less supportive of vaccines for contagious disease is that most of those diseases have essentially disappeared because of the vaccines; in other words, vaccines have been so effective that people have forgotten how terrible polio, diphtheria, measles, rabies, tetanus, mumps, and others really were. Cancer is much more in our faces; everyone has a relative or acquaintance affected by melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and others.

I suspect the reality of scientific achievement and the immediacy of personal experience will win out in the end.