People undergoing immunotherapy treatment for cancer and who got a Covid vaccine survived longer than those who did not get the vaccine, a new study finds. Jeff Coller, an mRNA expert at Johns Hopkins, examines why this hasn’t been seen with other vaccines.
Coller: With other vaccines, the flu vaccine maybe you might have seen it because with other vaccines most of the time it's children and children hopefully are not necessarily the patients that are coming down with some of these devastating cancers so you're never going to be able to make that correlation. With seasonal flu of course there's also limited adoption of the seasonal flu that's a factor. with the mRNA vaccines we saw millions of Americans receive it that so it was a huge cohort that synchronized in time too, that also is a very important aspect of the study you have a large number of people synchronized in time that you could follow.   :31
Coller says this natural experiment clearly shows the benefits of mRNA vaccines as a platform for treating many different diseases and conditions where our innate immune response is a critical component. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.