Sounds philosophically consistent. What could be more pro-life, pro-business and pro-freedom than being in favour of endless cell growth unchecked by cell apoptosis? Come to think of it, not only does curing cancer sound like a socialist anti-prosperity regulatory agenda, killing off cells that would naturally grow is a little too close to abortion.
And elitist!
They refuse to even let us abort cancer cells.
If you die you die.
The body has a way of shutting it down.
Cancer’s cells, Cancer’s choice
/s
Conservatives are generally opposed to any healthcare they personally do not need at the moment. They distrust science, education and medicine. Given a choice, most conservatives would dissolve all scientific research in the U.S.
Conservatism is a plague of idiocy, sickness and death. This has been true throughout all recorded history.
Fun fact! Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer -
yes, it works and has been independently verified. No, you can’t have it because embargo.EDIT: vaccine here isn’t actually what I thought. In this case it is a treatment to be used for certain kinds of lung cancer, not a preventative measure as we are used to thinking of Vaccine. Thanks to the comment below for going through it and pushing me to do proper research.
While my initial take was a glib link to a wikipedia page and not thoroughly researched, I do sill believe that the embargo has directly caused this treatment to come to market in the west as the levels of cooperation are non-existent. It has been used for 7 years in Cuba but is only now entering Stage 3 trials in the US.
Cuba have also became the first country to have 0 mother-child transmissions of HIV.
But the US has decided that working with Cuba to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (in the States alone) is less important than causing “economic dissatisfaction and hardship” to the Cuban people.
Slight correction on that vaccine, the FDA doesn’t authorize any drug for sale in the US that hasn’t passed it’s rigorous trials and gone through its approval process. It’s currently being tested and has more trials ongoing right now. FDA will be able to approve it for sale if it passes its trials.
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2023.41.16_suppl.9135
Also the word cancer vaccine kind of implies cure to some, but it’s not by any means:
“MST was 10.83 months for vaccinated vs. 8.86 months for non-vaccinated. In the Phase III trial, the 5-year survival rate was 14.4% for vaccinated subjects vs. 7.9% for controls.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346887/
So it might be a useful tool but just don’t want to get hopes up unnecessarily. People who’s immune system reacted to the vaccine the strongest did best, so current trials are focused on combining it with an immune checkpoint inhibitor drug to increase the immune response even more hopefully (and those drugs are already being used by themselves in cancer). These drugs block “checkpoints” in the immune system that would normally stop it from attacking things like yourself, which we kind of want it to do in cancer.
Not saying I support an embargo in Cuba, I don’t, just don’t want this comment to be inadvertently read as “Cuba has had the cure to lung cancer this whole time and you’re not allowed to have it!” which isn’t true.
Thank for you adding some incredibly well summarized context.
Cigarette industry would be all over a lung cancer vaccine
It’s also not a vaccine in the sense it’s preventing cancer, it’s for the treatment of cancer that is already there, specifically non small cell lung cancers (though it’s being tested in other cancers that use the signaling mechanism being targeted). Not saying it’s impossible that it could prevent cancer, just that it hasn’t been tested in that way to the best of my knowledge.
There is some precedence for a vaccine like that though. The HPV vaccine for instance prevents HPV (and therefore hpv related cancers), but is also used as a treatment if an HPV related cancer develops.
We should keep a record of the nay votes so we can remind them should any of them be diagnosed with cancer.
They get free government healthcare, so they don’t care.
Doesn’t matter how good your healthcare is if your cancer (or other disease) can’t be treated.
Doesn’t matter if your healthcare can be treated, if you cannot afford the cure.
That’s a problem for us plebs not them.
I would argue that it will become a problem for them too - e.g. pretty much every man will eventually get prostrate cancer, if he lives long enough rather than die of something else sooner, and on the converse side every woman will be affected by the current gender disparity in health research that has gone into “people” vs. “women” (particularly, we now know that the blood-brain barrier of the mother becomes much more permeable during pregnancy, and substances that should never end up in the brain… do, so even if a woman gives up her child for adoption immediately after birth, the act of pregnancy can have enormous effects upon the body).
But to be a literal millionaire now and die of cancer later, vs. to do the right thing and pass a bill but then not get re-elected by their base that hates sharing (don’t you remember when Jesus said “never show love to anyone, especially not those people over there - b/c they hath cooties”?:-P), it seems that they have made their choice… and we all will pay the price, them far less than us but still they will too.
lol, upvote
Those voting records could come in handy any old time…
They will still do mental gymnastic to blame democrat
I don’t know how accurate this is, but I know that it fits with Repubs voting against the migrant bill that they had formerly wanted because it would help Trump on the campaign. Whether this is true or not doesn’t change that they openly want to stall government, therefore this could be true.
I don’t know how accurate this is
Biden made a rather cavalier claim that he was going to fund investments in medical science that would lead to a final cure for all forms of cancer within the next decade. And I think we can safely say that’s bullshit.
However, ramping up blue sky medical research and public sector spending on the adoption of new medical technology would be helpful in treating a host of cancerous maladies and potentially curing or inoculating against others.
Consider that the US isn’t even on the front line of cancer research anymore. Cuba’s cancer research has outpaced research in the states for over a decade. That, alone, should tell you what kind of progress is possible with a little strategic public investment.
Whether this is true or not doesn’t change that they openly want to stall government, therefore this could be true.
Conservatives hate public investment, particularly when it threatens private profits. Liberals do too, abet not as fervently (see: our bipartisan obsession with the health of the domestic automotive, financial, real estate, insurance, and commercial export agricultural industries).
But this is more an issue of scoring political points. Republicans were happy enough to finance Operation Warp Speed under Trump, in order to fast track the vaccine they thought they’d get to take credit for in 2020. And they loved nothing more than giant state sponsored give-aways to Majority Leader Bill Frist’s family owned Hospital Corporation of America.
So they’re not strictly against government spending. They simply don’t want another Liberal Democrat like Kennedy taking credit for putting a man on the moon.
While I get the point you’re trying to make, it’s just incredibly wrong about cuba. Carry on for the rest.
Source: I do lots of cancer related research.
it’s just incredibly wrong about cuba
How Cuba Became a Biopharma Juggernaut
Source: I do lots of cancer related research.
Clearly not enough.
Not to be pedantic, but an impressive pharmaceutical industry is not the same as leading cancer research. Still impressive. Not the same. Again, I get your point, but no need to exaggerate realities.
an impressive pharmaceutical industry is not the same as leading cancer research
That’s both true and pedantic, but beside the point.
what if you logged on to the internet and were nice to people
Should we be nice to people who are lying?
Edit: Downvotes. So, it’s okay ✅ if I lie now. Good to know. You should be very concerned that there are bad actors here, who advocate for lying.
Another clear example why both sides are NOT the same.
They aren’t. But if one side could grow a pair instead of pretending that the other side is still willing to debate and act rationally like it’s still the 90s, that would be great.
This is the downside to choosing politicians that are so wealthy and therefore disconnected that the entire USA could fall and they would barely notice. Example: Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan was practically “everything is totally fine here, no need for like, changes or anything”.
Tbh, a cure for cancer is a little like finding a cure for all respiratory infections. You’re talking about a pathology that encompasses hundreds of distinct diseases. Sure, maybe it is doable, but calling it a moonshot is a little generous; landing on the moon would be several orders of magnitude easier by comparison, imo.
Just so I’m clear, it’s still shitty that they blocked this.
Read the article. It’s pretty clear that cancer is hundreds of different diseases and extremely unlikely to have a single silver bullet, but this description reads more like a coordination project
the program has made strides in expanding access to cancer detection screenings, especially to veterans, increased support for programs aimed at preventing cancer in the first place and provided funding to groundbreaking cancer cure research
Its goal is to cut cancer deaths in half by making diagnostics cheaper and more available, funding prevention, and funding research into treatments. No magical silver bullets here
When you type out the words “read the article”, it forms a verbal missile of hate aimed right at my heart
Ouch. Not intended as that but I do think your concern was answered in the article, and we’re all sometimes guilty of skimming the article or reacting to inflammatory headlines
I was being dramatic, no need for alarm. I read several articles a day, typically, but I’m usually pretty selective about it and this one didn’t make the cut, though I still wanted to discuss the topic. So, here we are.
I find it interesting that for many serious diseases, the biggest determinant of outcome can be how early you detect it. It’s not something I ever really appreciated before the advent of so many inexpensive tests, and seeing all sorts of stats on just how much difference early detection can make!
Yeah, particularly for cancer. Cancer, as I understand it, is a dice game from start to finish. The two commonalities all cancers have are that they’re cells that have immortalized and reproduce out of control. That is, they don’t die when they get signals to die, and they pick up one or more mutations that cause them to undergo cellular division at a higher rate than normal. This is how we still have HeLa cells today. So, the first dice game is getting one cell in your tissue to roll some flavor of those mutations together. From there, the dice start piling up in Cancer’s favor that it can roll more mutations to help it survive when it shouldn’t. The earlier you pick it up, the fewer dice cancer has to play with. Not to mention you’re not also having to fight the battle of trying to kill the cancer while it tries to kill you.
This is also one of the fronts where it’s thought that mRNA vaccines are going to be huge. In fact, IIRC, the technology was specifically developed with cancer in mind and its use for creating pathogen immunity was a secondary consideration. COVID may have helped catapult that technology years ahead of schedule in terms of development pipeline. IMO, COVID is going to do for medical science what WWII did for machinery, electronics, and atomic science; we’re probably going to start seeing some huge leaps forward in biomedical knowledge and technology coming from theCOVID-centered research initiatives launched all over the world.
Early detection is important for another reason. When trying to kill it you really want to be doing overkill. The less cells it is the less destructive overkill is.
Pro Life!
Cancer lives matter!
ALL cells matter!
You can blame Newt Gingrich for that one, he installed in the R’s hyper partisanship and the idea that they can never let the D’s get a “win”. It carried them to a majority back in the 80’s, and much like voodoo economics, they haven’t changed the playbook since, since it still works.
To me it seems, a rich minority is gaming the system (political theatre, Fox news, CNN… --> public opinion), hoping to secure wealth and power against “the will of the people”, up to a point where the system will eventually break and be replaced by dictatorship.
Ironically it is much more dangerous to be a billionaire in Russia or China than in the US or Europe.
Maybe that should be our message: it seems easier to exploit us without checks and balances, but having none can be very dangerous for you and your family.
However, the leader who will eventually emerge, the one using AI to check this comment, will be best for all of us, I’m sure!
Yes we all know that they fail at their jobs and fail to uphold anything that their office is supposed to stand for thereby failing the American people. Republicans are failures. That is an absolute fact.
> claims to be pro-life
> isn’t
GOP.jpg
As someone who works in oncology data science, this is fucking infuriating. But also, politically, it’s 100% expected.
Can someone call an adult?
Killing us all to own the libs.
