Dr. Ryan Cole and Mike Adams: Fear mongering about cancer and COVID-19 vaccines

A common antivax claim that encountered not long after I first started paying attention to the antivaccine movement is that vaccines cause cancer. I’ve encountered a number of variations of this claim throughout the years, but the most common and persistent claim is that the polio vaccine was contaminated with SV40 virus. While it is true that back in the late 1950s, batches of polio vaccine were contaminated with a monkey virus known as SV40, which can cause cancer in experimental animals, as I discussed in my usual excessive depth when analyzing what I like to call this “zombie meme,” there’s no evidence of an increase in cancer rates attributable to the polio vaccine. Completely unsurprisingly, more recently antivaxxers have been trying to blame COVID-19 vaccines for causing cancer, sometimes (as is their common practice) totally misrepresenting unrelated research to make their false claims. They’re still at it, of course, packaging this old lie in a new form. Specifically an Idaho doctor and anti masker, Dr. Ryan Cole, is claiming that he’s seeing a huge increase in endometrial cancer since the vaccines have rolled. Sure, he was doing this two months ago, but now he’s being amplified again, which led me to decide that it’s worth discussing, given that I missed addressing this bit of misinformation when it first surfaced.

Here’s the video of Dr. Cole, which is included in an article by conspiracy crank Mike Adams entitled THE VACCINE-CANCER ATROCITY: Like clockwork, most vaccinated Americans will lose immune function by Christmas and start growing accelerated CANCER tumors that will kill them over the next ten years:

Here are the sorts of claims Dr. Cole has been making:

In a video produced by the Idaho state government’s “Capitol Clarity” project, Cole revealed how he is now seeing a 2,000 percent chronic illness increase in folks who took Donald “father of the vaccine” Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” injections.

“Since January 1, in the laboratory, I’m seeing a 20-times increase of endometrial cancers over what I see on an annual basis,” Cole stated in the video.

“I’m not exaggerating at all because I look at my numbers year over year, and I’m like ‘Gosh, I’ve never seen this many endometrial cancers before.’”

Cole revealed these and other statistics at a March 18 event, telling Idahoans that the so-called “vaccines” for the Fauci Flu are invoking a “reverse HIV” type of autoimmune response in people’s bodies.

A normal, well-functioning immune system has two types of cells that keep the body healthy: “helper” T-cells, also known as CD4, and “killer” T-cells, also known as CD8 cells. In the “fully vaccinated,” there is a massive suppression of “helper” T-cells, Cole warns, which leaves the patient susceptible to an array of illnesses.

“Post-vaccine, what we are seeing is a drop in your killer T-cells, in your CD8 cells,” Cole stated. “And what do CD8 cells do? They keep all other viruses in check.”

Apparently, Dr. Cole has been peddling this message since January. In fact, here’s the truly depressing thing about Dr. Cole’s misinformation. Note the “Capitol Clarity Project” mentioned above. Sadly, for residents of the state of Idaho, its official government health sources have been repeatedly hosting Dr. Cole and amplifying his misinformation:

Cole came into prominence in January of 2021 when the Idaho government put in place an effort called “Capitol Clarity,” with the stated goal of keeping Idahoans informed about the facts surrounding COVID-19.  

Capitol Clarity has since hosted Dr. Ryan Cole multiple times to provide information to the public about vaccine safety and COVID-19 measures more broadly.  

The videos of Dr. Cole at these events, which were originally posted on YouTube, have since been deleted by the Google owned video platform in a continual effort of censorship by Big Tech. 

Before we get into his claims, who is Dr. Ryan? He states in the video that he is a board-certified anatomic and clinical pathologist trained at the Mayo Clinic, is licensed in 12 states, and runs what he describes as the “largest independent laboratory in the state of Idaho.” What Mike Adams does not mention (of course) is that Dr. Steven Kohtz, the president of the Idaho Medical Association Board of Trustees, and Susie Keller, the CEO of the Idaho Medical Association have teamed up to lodge a formal complaint to the Idaho Board of Medicine about Dr. Cole’s activity, which—surprise! surprise!—includes prescribing ivermectin, the anti-helminthic (roundworm) medicine most commonly used for veterinary applications but also used in humans that does not work against COVID-19. Of course, I can’t help but note that a pathologist, like Dr. Cole, generally does not see patients, except as parts removed during surgeries and biopsies, or in the morgue and should not be prescribing drugs to anyone, but that’s never stopped COVID-19 deniers before.

Dr. Cole, unsurprisingly, starts out by claiming that the vaccines are “experimental vaccines,” saying that this is “very important.” As I’ve pointed out more times than I can remember, this is a common antivax talking point that conflates a legal definition of “experimental” or “investigational” with a scientific one. Because the vaccines at the time had been approved by the FDA for use under an “emergency use authorization” (EUA), by law they had to be listed as “investigational.” Again, that’s a legal definition. From a scientific definition, these vaccines had been found to be safe and effective in large randomized clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people before the EUA had been issued. By September, when this video was made, these vaccines had been administered to hundreds of millions of people with an excellent safety record. Similarly, Dr. Cole goes on to blame the worse outcomes in the US to our being a nation, apparently, of vitamin D deficient fatties. (He didn’t use those words, but it’s a common theme in antivax literature to blame the victim for any bad outcome, and obesity and type II diabetes are definitely risk factors for severe disease and poor outcomes and death from COVID-19.)

Oddly enough, he also claims that the Delta variant of SARs-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is, although more transmissible, less virulent and deadly, even though the evidence shows that, at best, it is no more virulent than the original strain, with some evidence suggesting that it is more, not less, virulent in that it is more likely to put its victims in the hospital. Dr. Cole cites data from India, where (or so he claims) the Delta strain is several times less deadly than the original strain as he goes on and on about how viruses “naturally evolve” to be less lethal (something that can happen but is nowhere near universally true), and failing to note that the death statistics from India are definitely a massive undercount, perhaps by as much as factor of ten.

So how does this increased risk of cancer supposedly happen? As is commonly the case with antivaxxers, Dr. Cole starts handwaving about immunology and how “natural immunity” (in reality, post-infection immunity) is so much better than vaccine-induced immunity, while echoing Dr. Hooman Noorchasm’s fear mongering about how it is supposedly dangerous to vaccinate someone who has already been infected by COVID-19. Claiming that different strains will outrun the vaccine’s ability to induce immunity, Dr. Cole then claims that we “early therapies” for this virus, including (of course!) ivermectin. Hilariously, he cites Dr. Peter McCullough, a quack whom we’ve met before who likes to claim that COVID-19 vaccines are deadly and that his protocols reduce the death rate from COVID-19 by 86%. I’ve discussed the study that produced the figure of a mortality reduction of 86% before. It came from an awful meta-analysis of ivermectin that included downright fraudulent papers. One also can’t help but note that one of the early papers by Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC Alliance) and his quack protocol that involves ivermectin, which claims to result in a 75% decrease in the death rate from COVID-19, has been retracted due to bad math.

Of course, it’s little surprise to learn that Dr. Cole is a member of the FLCCC, whose members have been grifting their little grifting hearts out over ivermectin:

Next up, Dr. Cole repeats the handwaving he’s been repeating since January. Basically, after pointing out how a “normal, well-functioning immune system” has two types of cells that keep the body healthy, namely “helper” T-cells, also known as CD4, and “killer” T-cells, also known as CD8 cells. In the “fully vaccinated,” Dr. Cole claims, there is a “massive suppression” of helper T-cells, which leaves the patient susceptible to an array of illnesses, claiming:

“Post-vaccine, what we are seeing is a drop in your killer T-cells, in your CD8 cells,” Cole stated. “And what do CD8 cells do? They keep all other viruses in check.”

I kept trying to find out what science published in the peer-reviewed literature Dr. Cole was citing. I couldn’t find it. (I was amused, though, at how one of the papers listed after the Brighteon video was this one, which was a randomized controlled clinical trial that actually found no difference between ivermectin and placebo in preventing hospitalization after COVID-19 infection. It’s almost as though they expect that the rubes won’t actually click on the links and read the actual papers.

As for the claim that the mRNA vaccines somehow suppress T-helper cells, I’m not the only one who looked for the source. Health Feedback thinks it’s found the source, and—surprise! surprise!—just as antivaxxers did when they claimed that mRNA vaccines cause cancer by shutting down tumor suppressor genes, Dr. Cole appears to be completely misrepresenting the science, science co-authored by Katalin Karikó, one of the pioneering scientists who were integral to the development of mRNA vaccines:

The UK Column article claimed that the study used RNA modifications to “turn off [T]oll-like receptors”. But no such thing is described in the study by Karikó et al. The modifications and their effects are associated with the modified RNA only, and don’t change the ability of TLRs to detect other microbial components.

To use an analogy, modifying RNA is like putting on camouflage to evade detection by sentries guarding a border. But those sentries remain capable of detecting other intruders that don’t have the camouflage.

Furthermore, as Karikó et al. noted, the modifications used in the study are also observed in nature, and mammalian RNA is naturally replete with such modifications. If the article’s claim that such modifications weaken the immune system were true to begin with, then such pre-existing modifications alone would be enough to weaken the immune system even without the COVID-19 vaccines.

In short, the article misrepresented the study’s findings and is inconsistent with real-world observations.

Basically, this research was designed to get around a problem with mRNA, which is that it is unstable and vulnerable to the body’s defense mechanisms. For someone who claims to have a lot of experience in immunology, Dr. Cole doesn’t know immunology or molecular biology. Either that, or he’s intentionally misrepresenting the science. Take your pick.

Also, there’s zero evidence for an increase in cancer rates attributed to COVID-19 vaccines. For one thing, even if COVID-19 vaccines could cause cancer (and there’s no evidence that they can), it would take years, decades even, to see this effect. Seeing “200 times more endometrial cancer) in March 2020, only three months after the vaccines had been widely distributed under the FDA’s EUA, would, even if accurate, not be good evidence that the vaccine caused it, because how many of the women from whom those endometrial biopsies came would even have been vaccinated by then? Also, even those who were would have received the vaccine at most three months before Dr. Cole made the claim. That’s far too short a time to cause endometrial cancer. As a board certified pathologist, Dr. Cole should know this. I bet he does know this, too, but is counting on the fact that most people don’t know much about cancer biology and how long it takes for cancer to develop, even at its most rapid. It doesn’t matter anyway, because much more reputable sources have reported no evidence of a massive spike in endometrial cancer, melanoma, or any other cancers since COVID-19 vaccines rolled out.

Adams also cites a less famous crank than Dr. Cole, one whom I hadn’t heard of before, named Dr. Paul Cottrell, who apparently believes that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of a US government bioweapons “antidote” gone awry. Cottrell basically explicitly claims that the chemical modifications to the mRNA used in the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were designed to “suppress the immune system.”

That’s probably why Adams writes, having been forced to acknowledge that cancer mortality has been steadily declining for decades:

The vaccine holocaust, it seems, is going to be felt as a “cancer tsunami” that will somehow be blamed on everything else except vaccines.

From 1999 – 2019, cancer death rates plunged from 200 per 100,000 population to 146 per 100,000 population. (Source: CDC.gov) For all of 2019, there were almost 600,000 cancer deaths reported in the United States. The CDC has not yet published data for 2020.

Data from 2021 will be published in 2023, and data from 2022 will be published in 2024 if it maintains the same schedule.

Prediction: 2022 cancer fatalities will explode above one million fatalities, and cancer death rates will stay elevated for the next decade, all due to covid vaccines that began in 2021. However, we won’t see these data until 2024.

There’s no nefarious reason for these delays; it just takes that long to compile the statistics. Cancer statistics are generally published every January, a little more than a year after the most recent year in the statistics (e.g,, the 2022 report will be published in a couple of months, a little more than a year after 2020 ended). Also, I’ll take that bet on Adams’ prediction that cancer fatalities will “explode” above 5 million, which would be a more than 50% increase in a year, something that’s never been seen before. In any event, any oncologist or cancer biologist knows that Adams’ prediction is nonsense. Again, even in the incredibly unlikely event that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of cancer, we probably would not see the effect in 2021, 2022, or likely even five years from now. Maybe in ten years we would see it. Of course, there is no known biological mechanism by which these vaccines cause cancer, hence all the handwaving about unproven and speculative mechanisms by these cranks.

Using dubious “predictions” based on misrepresentations of science by Dr. Cole and Dr. Cottrell, plus other sources, Adams goes on to make what can only be called a social Darwinist-like, eugenics sort of prediction:

The final point to understand in all this is that certain professions have much higher rates of vaccine obedience, meaning they will suffer far higher-than-normal rates of cancer mortality in the coming years. Those professions include health care (doctors, nurses, etc.), school teachers, first responders, government workers and tech industry workers.

Realistically, we should expect to see an accelerated die-off of people in these industries from 2022 – 2031 due to vaccine effects, both medium term and long term.

This means health care is going to experience an unprecedented staffing crisis for many years to come, especially as members of the public who also took the same deadly vaccines wind up in hospital emergency rooms, suffering from heart attacks, strokes, respiratory disorders, neurological disorders, and so on. This is already happening across US hospitals, right this very minute. And it’s going to get far worse this winter.

At the same time, people who don’t have jobs will be spared from the death wave because they aren’t forced into taking vaccines. So we’re going to see very high survival rates among welfare recipients and the unemployed, while the employed (productive) members of the economy are killed off in record numbers.

Think about what that means for America’s largest cities as the first responders, doctors and productive workers die off, leaving behind the welfare recipients and otherwise unemployed people. This is obviously going to thrust US cities into chaos, lawlessness and desperation — which seems to be the No. 1 goal of Marxist Democrats and Joe Biden puppetmasters.

As an aside, I can’t help but observe one thing that I’ve never been able to figure out about conspiracy theories of the type peddled by Adams above. Why? Why would any leader want to kill off his nation’s most productive citizens and generate lawlessness and chaos? After all, what Adams neglects to mention is that the military is being required to take the vaccine as well, which means that, even if Adams ravings were true, presumably President Biden’s New World Order “puppetmasters” won’t even have the troops for him to use to impose “control” on the populace. And what about the simple observation that there is a huge difference in the willingness to take the vaccine between liberals and conservatives, with liberals far more willing to take the vaccine than conservatives? Wouldn’t that mean that more liberals will be dying off in the next ten years, something that, presumably, Adams would like?

So many questions.

I realize that dealing with Adams’ conspiracy theories is sometimes like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel, given how over-the-top he always is. However, he is merely taking a viral video by Dr. Cole, adding to it a lesser known video by Dr. Cottrell, and using the nonsense in them to spread fear of COVID-19 vaccines as horrible cancer-causing agents that will kill off the most educated and “productive” citizens—shades of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged, only with an involuntary removal of the “makers” from society this time!—and thus spreading chaos. Still, as bonkers as it is, Adams’ conspiracy theory is, at its core, nothing more than a variation on a very old antivaccine theme, that vaccines cause cancer.

And I haven’t even gone into the claims that the vaccine causes AIDS mentioned in the articles.