The Moonshot program was the largest, organized effort by the U.S. government to find cancer cures. Congress voted it down.
  • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
    69·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • astreus@lemmy.ml
    4121·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ranvier@lemmy.world
      671·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • Ranvier@lemmy.world
          4·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • Stern@lemmy.world
    18·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Delusional@lemmy.world
    9·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      01·
      1 year ago

      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.