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Article overreaches with claim that FDA admitted cancer treatments cause cancer | Fact check

Joedy McCreary   Paste BN
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The claim: The FDA said cancer treatments cause cancer

A Dec. 7 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) makes a dramatic claim about modern medicine.

“FDA Admits Cancer Treatments Actually CAUSE Cancer,” reads the headline of a story from The People’s Voice, which was shared as a screenshot. Superimposed text included in the screenshot states, "ALL OF WESTERN MEDICINE IS A FRAUD."

The post was liked more than 1,500 times in six days. The People’s Voice story was shared more than 600 times on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool.

More from the Paste BN Fact Check Team:

Our rating: False

The Food and Drug Administration did not admit cancer treatments cause cancer. The organization says it is investigating reports of secondary cancers that developed in patients who received one specific type of therapy. The website that published the claim is known to spread misinformation.

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The FDA is investigating the risks associated with one type of cancer treatment after reviewing reports that a small number of people who received it later developed secondary malignancies, the organization said Nov. 28 in a statement.

But the organization has not said cancer treatments cause cancer, as the post claims. That conclusion does not appear in the FDA’s statement, and there are no reputable reports that it has made such a sweeping determination.

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“If you look at their claim on the surface, unfortunately, it seems like all that these therapies do is cause cancer, which is not at all the case,” Dr. Matthew McKinney, a hematologic oncologist and assistant professor at the Duke University School of Medicine, told Paste BN.

Rather, the FDA is looking into the risks associated with a specific type of treatment that uses T cells, a type of white blood cell, that are genetically altered in a lab to seek out and destroy cancer cells.

The first such Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell immunotherapies, or CAR-T therapies, were approved in 2017, FDA spokesperson Carly Pflaum said in an email to Paste BN. They are used to treat advanced blood malignancies that include leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center.

Dr. Eric Smith, a professor at Harvard Medical School and an oncology researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, estimated in an interview with The Harvard Gazette that about 35,000 patients have received a CAR-T treatment.

Pflaum said the FDA received 20 reports of T-cell malignancies as of Nov. 29, “which suggest that T-cell malignancy is an identified risk” for those therapies.

But researchers have not yet established a causal relationship between the treatment and second cancers, McKinney said.

“Whether or not this is a bystander effect or something directly related to the fact that you’re genetically engineering T cells, and this is a consequence of that therapy, and you transform one of those cells into cancer, we don’t know,” he said.

The screenshot in the post is of a headline of a Nov. 30 story in The People’s Voice that claims the FDA admitted that “Big Pharma cancer treatments actually cause cancer in humans.”

McKinney disputed that assertion.

“This also potentially gets twisted to Big Pharma or big physician groups hiding evidence that their therapies are toxic, when indeed, we all work together to try to help patients do as well and live as long as they can with these and other therapies,” he said.

The People's Voice, previously known as NewsPunch, has repeatedly published fabricated stories, many of which Paste BN has debunked.

Paste BN reached out to The People’s Voice and to the social media user who shared the claim but did not immediately receive responses.

Lead Stories also debunked the claim.

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