Like a bunny boiler who refuses to die in a horror movie, the Covid jabs are back. Headlines trumpet the familiar narrative: ‘New sub-variant of Covid-19 wreaking havoc as epidemiologist encourages vaccinations amid rising infections.’ Tucked away in the copy is an admission by Deakin University epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett that ‘the variant doesn’t seem to cause more severe disease,’ it’s simply ‘more infectious’.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler played his part, telling Australians last Friday that he had just received a Covid booster and encouraging others to reflect on when they last got the jab. That might not prompt fond memories. Covid vaccination rates have collapsed in Australia; just 6 per cent of Australians have received a booster in the past six months.

Why the sudden disinterest? One clue may lie in the latest Rasmussen Reports survey in the US, which found that 51 per cent of American adults believe the Covid-19 vaccine likely caused heart inflammation in many recipients. And it’s not just myocarditis worrying Americans.

On 20 May, Scott Adams, 67, the creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert, announced on his YouTube channel that he had an ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Inspired by Joe Biden’s disclosure of his own cancer diagnosis, Adams explained that he now expected ‘to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.’

Two-and-a-half years earlier, in January 2023, Adams had shocked viewers with another confession: ‘The anti-vaxxers appear to be right,’ he said. ‘The people who did not get vaccinated… got natural immunity and no vaccination. Can we all agree that was the winning path?’ His haunting concern? ‘The thing they are not worrying about is the thing I have to worry about, which is, “I wonder if that vaccination, in five years from now…’”

Has Adams been silently worrying about vaccine side effects ever since? He delayed going public about his cancer, fearing, in his words, becoming just ‘the dying cancer guy’ and the predicted nastiness from his enemies, ‘in other words, people who are Democrats, mostly – are going to come after me pretty hard.’

Could Adams’ aggressive, metastatic prostate cancer have been caused or accelerated by Covid vaccines? We don’t have a definitive answer – yet. But there are biologically plausible mechanisms by which certain immune or molecular pathways affected by vaccination could, under specific conditions, increase the risk of cancer.

Professor Angus Dalgleish, a respected oncologist at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, has voiced concerns about a potential link between mRNA Covid-19 vaccines and the emergence of aggressive ‘turbo cancers’. He has proposed several mechanisms, including T-cell suppression, which could reduce the body’s ability to detect and destroy cancer cells; immune modulation, which might allow dormant cancer cells to awaken; and DNA contamination – specifically, concerns about DNA fragments in vaccine preparations potentially integrating into human DNA.

Magda Szubanski, 64. the comedian best known for her role in Kath & Kim, became another tragic case when she announced on 29 May that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a rare and aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Sadly, there are case reports and clinical observations of new lymphoma diagnoses following vaccination, and of rapid progression in patients previously in remission. These have been published in respected journals like Medicina (2022), detailing a T-cell lymphoma post mRNA vaccination, and Cureus (2021), which reported a case of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma following a second Pfizer dose.

Could the spike protein or the mRNA platform be involved? Possible mechanisms include immune stimulation that triggers expansion of latent or subclinical lymphoma. mRNA vaccines stimulate the immune system robustly, activating B-cells, T-cells, and dendritic cells. In rare cases, this could promote the growth of abnormal lymphoid clones, especially if they were already pre-malignant. The spike protein binds to ACE2 and other receptors, influencing endothelial, immune, and possibly hematopoietic systems. Hypotheses include chronic immune activation, disruption of interferon pathways (crucial in tumour surveillance), and immune imbalance in genetically predisposed individuals.

Szubanski, like Adams, supported Covid vaccination. During the pandemic, she said she had tried to help as a ‘good citizen’ and ‘morale boost’ but claims, ‘I categorically DID NOT insist on them (vaccinations) for others’. She did, however, support vaccine mandates, although she says that ‘mandatory’ was the wrong term: ‘It’s optional but conditional. You can choose not to vaccinate but then face the consequences of how others react to your choices.’ In August 2020, she posted to X: ‘To dob in or not to dob in; that is the question. Middle-aged guy swaggering along not wearing a mask. I called out “Mate, why aren’t you wearing a mask?” His response? Lifted his T-shirt to bare his chest at me and said “Why are you?” I got a pic. Moral dilemma. Should I?’ According to her poll, 88 per cent encouraged her to ‘Dob him in.’

The comedy roll call doesn’t end there. The Simpsons may have predicted Covid, but no one predicted that Emmy Award-winning writer Steve Pepoon – who resembled a real-life Homer Simpson – would ‘die unexpectedly’ at just 68. Pepoon had been undergoing treatment for two years for cardiac amyloidosis, a serious condition in which misfolded proteins, known as amyloids, accumulate in the heart, damaging its structure and function.

Can the spike protein expressed by mRNA vaccines trigger amyloidosis? Several in vitro and in silico studies have shown that fragments of the Sars-CoV-2 spike protein contain sequences capable of forming amyloid-like fibrils. A 2021 paper by Nyström & Hammarström (Sweden) demonstrated that spike-derived peptides can aggregate into amyloid structures in laboratory settings.

What’s deeply disturbing is that there is almost no government-funded research into these possibilities. Why have public health institutions shown such asymmetry in their research priorities? Billions were spent on vaccine promotion and behaviour-change campaigns. Yet there has been minimal investigation into the population-level phenomena that emerged alongside mass vaccination: persistent excess mortality, collapsing fertility rates, unexplained adverse events, and new and aggressive cancer trends.

This imbalance is real, and it undermines public trust in institutions tasked with impartial scientific inquiry.

Perhaps this helps explain why so few Australians are rushing for their next booster.

As Scott Adams put it: ‘Really, the anti-vaxxers were just distrustful of big companies and big government – that’s never wrong.’