06/17/2026
This post has been circulating online for years, and somehow the people sharing it seem to think they're making a compelling argument against vaccines. In reality, all it does is highlight their lack of understanding of how different diseases work and why some are far more difficult to vaccinate against than others.
First, the claim that there are "no vaccines for cancer" is simply false. We already have vaccines that prevent certain cancers, such as the Hepatitis B vaccine, which helps prevent liver cancer, and the HPV vaccine, which dramatically reduces the risk of cervical and several other cancers.
We also have FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccines such as Provenge for prostate cancer and Imlygic for melanoma.
Another thing this poster is missing is that, cancer is not a single disease caused by a single virus. It's hundreds of different diseases with different mutations. A "universal vaccine for cancer" would be biologically impossible for that very reason, but targeted cancer vaccines already exist.
Second, the comparison with HIV and the common cold is equally misleading.
HIV is one of the most difficult viruses ever studied because it mutates rapidly and is exceptionally good at evading the immune system. The common cold isn't even one disease; it's caused by more than 200 different viruses. The fact that these are challenging vaccine targets says nothing about whether vaccines work.
And no, COVID-19 vaccines didn't just appear out of thin air in 12 months. They were built on decades of research. Scientists had been working on mRNA technology since the 1980s, and key breakthroughs that made mRNA vaccines possible occurred long before COVID-19 existed. When the pandemic arrived, researchers were able to apply an already-developed platform to a new virus.
Again, the speed also came from unprecedented funding, global collaboration, overlapping trial phases, and manufacturing at scale - not from skipping safety testing.
Anybody with basic understanding of infectious diseases and cancer biology would know that some diseases are easier vaccine targets than others, while some are extraordinarily difficult. There’s no mystery here.
The fact that we don't have a vaccine for every disease out there is not evidence that vaccines don't work. It's evidence that biology is complicated.
