Over the past four years I have made it a principle to keep asking the uncomfortable questions. Not because I want to provoke for the sake of it, but because medicine demands transparency. If we only ever study what is convenient, we risk misleading both ourselves and the public.
Recently, a major paper caught my attention. It showed that SARS-CoV-2 infection increases the risk of HPV-related cancers—cervical, vaginal, vulvar, anal, and oropharyngeal. The researchers drew from more than a hundred health systems and millions of patients, and the findings were striking: infection was associated with up to a doubling of cancer risk in some cases.
Shih, YH., Yang, CY. & Lung, CC. SARS-CoV-2 infection heightens the risk of developing HPV-related carcinoma in situ and cancer. Discov Onc 16, 1552 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12672-025-03403-4
That alone should have been headline news. But here’s the part that stopped me in my tracks: the study had the vaccination data. They knew who was vaccinated and who wasn’t. Yet they made no attempt to analyse whether COVID vaccination was linked to cancer outcomes.
Why is that?
If there is nothing to hide, why not include vaccination as a comparator? Imagine the reassurance it would bring if the authors could show that vaccinated individuals actually had lower risk. It would bolster the public health narrative at a time when trust is at an all-time low. Instead, they avoid the question entirely, and in doing so, fuel suspicion.
It reminds me of the early smoking debates. For decades, scientists published study after study on lung disease, air pollution, genetics—anything but the cigarettes right in front of them. It took thirty years before the link between smoking and cancer was finally acknowledged. By then, the damage was incalculable.
I am not saying the COVID vaccines deliberately cause cancer. What I am saying is this: if infection can accelerate cancer progression by distracting and exhausting the immune system, then we must at least consider whether repeated vaccination, through its own immune effects, could also play a role. To refuse to ask the question is not science—it’s avoidance.
The Biological Mechanisms We Can’t Ignore
The cancer link in the SARS-CoV-2 infection paper wasn’t imagined—it was grounded in biology. Researchers outlined several pathways by which infection might accelerate HPV-related cancers:
Cytokine storms (IL-6): COVID infection drives IL-6 to high levels, weakening CD8 T-cell activity and impairing immune surveillance. HPV itself also upregulates IL-6, creating a double-hit that favours cancer progression.
T-cell exhaustion (PD-1/PD-L1): In severe COVID, T-cells shift from hyperactivation to exhaustion, with PD-1/PD-L1 upregulation. HPV lesions exploit this same pathway to evade immunity, allowing precancers to advance.
Loss of p53 and Rb control: HPV’s oncogenes E6/E7 degrade p53 and Rb. COVID infection has been linked to reduced p53 activity as well, further stripping away a key tumour suppressor.
APOBEC3 dysregulation: Normally a DNA-editing defence against viruses, APOBEC3 is disrupted when p53 is suppressed. That promotes mutations and immune escape in HPV-related cells.
Taken together, the picture is clear: COVID infection doesn’t directly infect cervical or oropharyngeal cells—it weakens the body’s ability to keep HPV-driven lesions in check.
But here is the uncomfortable extension: if vaccines repeatedly stimulate similar immune pathways—IL-6, IgG subclass shifts, T-cell exhaustion—shouldn’t we at least ask whether they could create similar permissive environments in predisposed individuals? Not proof, but a hypothesis worth testing.
I would prefer to believe this is not a deliberate cover-up, but rather a form of cognitive dissonance. Researchers, locked into their narrative, simply cannot conceive of asking the question. But history will not be kind if it turns out that the data was there all along, and no one dared to look.
Science must be fearless. If vaccination has no link to cancer, prove it. If there is a risk, identify it and mitigate it. Either way, transparency is the only path forward.
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