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[–] 35 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Vaccines are typically meant to protect against viruses or bacteria. Cancer is neither of those. hiv is a virus but the political will to produce effective treatments was not always there. I think a lot of young people underestimate the homophobia that was pervasive not all that long ago and how it was tied to the aids epidemic.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    There are some promising efforts for vaccines against cancer. It's teaching your immune system to kill cells that were supposed to die on their own. It's a relatively recent development, though.

    Plus, as should always be stated with cancer treatments, there is no singular "cancer". It's a class of related problems that need to be handled individually. Vaccine against prostate cancer shouldn't be expected to work against breast cancer. Anything that claims to cure cancer in a blanket way should be treated with great suspicion.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Oh boy, that could also go horribly wrong too, what if a cell is a little bit retarded in it's growth for some reason but would develop into a useful cell but, NOPE body killed it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    It could, but it's also improving on something your immune system already does. Out of all the trillions of cells undergoing division in your body all the time, a few of them go cancerous each and every day. Your immune system almost always takes them out. It's the one time out of a bajilion that things go wrong.

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