"The Emperor of All Maladies" Accelerated

Epidemiologist Harvey Risch concerned about rise of 'turbo cancers'

In the 2007 film I Am Legend, an attempt to genetically re-engineer the measles virus to cure cancer becomes lethal and wipes out most of mankind. Those who do not die of the genetically re-engineered virus become mutant vampires. For the most part, the film is garbage entertainment, though I found it an interesting iteration of the main theme of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Three years later, Siddhartha Mukherjee published his magisterial book, The Emperor of All Maladies, about the history of cancer and mankind’s efforts to understand and treat it, going all the way to the ancient Egyptians. A major theme in the book is that the causes of cancer have always, to some degree, been a mystery. The “Emperor of All Maladies” seems to originate in the same mysterious substrate as life itself.

For over a century, modern science has labored to find ways to reduce the terrible disease burden of cancer, and much progress has been made. It would therefore be harder to image a more singularly idiotic action that to produce—and to insist that everyone receive—an experimental vaccine for a respiratory virus that may cause cancer. Surely this could never happen. Right?

While conducting research for our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19, my favorite interview was with Dr. Harvey Risch—professor emeritus of epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. A man of vast education and culture, we talked for almost three hours about epidemiology, epistemology, and history. After we finished our recorded conversation, we talked about the music of George Gershwin. Professor Risch struck me as the sort of cultured doctor whom one might have encountered in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, when the city was a hothouse of medical and cultural innovation.

Professor Risch spent most of his career as an epidemiologist studying cancer. In a recent interview with Jan Jekielek at The Epoch Times, he spoke about alarming observations that cancer clinicians have recently reported. For example:

“What clinicians have been seeing,” said Dr. Risch, “is very strange things: For example, 25-year-olds with colon cancer, who don't have family histories of the disease—that's basically impossible along the known paradigm for how colon cancer works—and other long-latency cancers that they're seeing in very young people." He said this is not how cancer normally develops.

For over a year, Dr. Peter McCullough has been deeply concerned about the possibility that mRNA COVID-19 injections may in some way impair the immune system’s natural ability to suppress the growth of cancerous cells. At the same time, he has been reluctant to express his concern without more data and understanding of what is going on.

From Professor Risch’s decades of studying cancer epidemiology, he is probably the most qualified scientist to examine and talk about this emerging situation. I highly recommend watching his interview.