Myrna Mantaring and the bogus claim that COVID-19 vaccines caused a 1,432.33% increase in cancer

If there’s a lesson that I’ve learned about the claims of cranks, quacks, and pseudoscientists, it’s that too much is never enough in terms of their hyperbolic claims. For example, with respect to COVID-19 vaccines and cancer, it wasn’t enough just to falsely claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer. Oh, no. They had to cause “turbo cancers,” cancers so much nastier, fatal, and prone to appearing in younger people than regular boring, run-of-the-mill cancers. Nor is it enough to say that the vaccines have caused the incidence of cancer merely to have doubled or tripled—or even quadrupled—any of which, if true and provable with statistics and epidemiology linking vaccination to cancers, would be alarming enough. That’s not enough for cranks. Oh, no. Behold the latest claim from Myrna Mantaring, MT, MCI, MS, MBA, CLSp MB (ASCP), who “has more than 50 years of experience in the fields of Diagnostic and Research Laboratory Technology, Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Biology” (but apparently none in epidemiology), who has appeared with antivaxxer Polly Tommey (buddy of Andrew Wakefield) on CHD.TV to claim that there has been a “143,233% increase in cancers due to COVID vaccination” in the US:

"The increase in cancer, according to the latest report, the US government data confirms [a] 143,233% increase in cancer cases due to COVID vaccination. That's unreal. But it's true."

Myrna Mantaring, MT, MCI, MS, MBA, CLSp MB (ASCP), who has more than 50 years of experience in… pic.twitter.com/kzDcuHDb9c

— Sense Receptor (@SenseReceptor) August 18, 2024

Amusingly, even some antivaxxers are responding with “WTF?”:

I don't think the increase is that high.

— My Dog Is Fat (Fat Dog Acceptance Movement) (@CypressXMX) August 18, 2024

Interestingly enough, the video of Polly Tommey interviewing Myrna Mantaring was first posted on CHD.TV on August 14 under The People’s Study but it didn’t appear to start gaining much traction until last week, when The Lioness of Judah posted a link to the video on their popular conspiracy Substack, Exposing the Darkness, having shown up on—where else?—Rumble.

The money quote that all the sources amplifying this video cite is this:

The increase in cancer, according to the latest report, the US government data confirms [a] 143,233% increase in cancer cases due to COVID vaccination. That’s unreal. But it’s true.

Big, if true.

Actually, Mantaring was right the first time, when she categorized it as “unreal.” But who, pray tell, is Myrna Mantaring? Her history, as described as follows. From 2005 to 2015 she served as a military hospital’s health science administrator and research-technology laboratory manager. (Note that the hospital is not named.) From 2015 until her retirement in 2021, she also worked as a clinical-diagnostic laboratory manager for the same hospital’s department of nephrology. Again, these are not really qualifications that I would associate with the ability to be able to parse and analyze “US government data” regarding COVID-19 vaccination and cancer, much less to conclude that COVID vaccines had caused a 1,423.33-fold increase in cancer cases when even a quack like William “turbo cancer” Makis doesn’t make such a claim.

So why write about a fringe claim that is clearly absolute bollocks (as my British friends would put it)? I would argue that it’s worth my attention for the same reason that writing about Dr. Marty Makary’s bogus “estimate” that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US, namely to examine such factoids under the lens of critical thinking and basic mathematical literacy. The main difference between the two is that Makary’s estimate became so widely believed that I keep seeing it pop up, mentioned as an accepted factoid, even in ostensibly evidence- and science-based sources, like STAT News and John Oliver’s This Week Tonight. It doesn’t even matter that, like Mantaring’s estimate, it doesn’t even pass the “smell test” in terms of being plausible from a strictly mathematical standpoint, although, admittedly, it is more plausible than Mantaring by a lot.

Here’s what I mean.

Makary’s estimate in 2016 was that that over 251,000 people a year were dying in hospitals as a result of medical errors.  According to the CDC, in 2010 only 715,000 of US deaths occurred in hospitals, implying that, if Makary’s estimate were accurate, then 35% of inpatient deaths are due to medical errors. It was worse than that, though, because Makary’s upper estimate was 400,000 inpatient deaths due to medical error. That was 56%—yes, 56%—of all inpatient deaths! As I said at the time It wasn’t anywhere near plausible that somewhere between one-third to over one-half of all inpatient deaths in the US were due to medical error. It just wasn’t, unless you’re a conspiracy theorist of the type who believes that hospitals were intentionally killing COVID-19 patients through their protocols. Of course, Makary’s estimate, based as it was on unjustified extrapolation from small studies that used an overly broad definition of death by medical error, was just low enough to seem plausible if you didn’t look too closely at the numbers and didn’t compare them to known statistics.

Now, let’s do the same thing with Myrna Mantaring’s estimates. To do that, I head over to the CDC’s website and look at the incidence of new cancer cases by year:

There are a couple of things right here that we can look at. First, note that the trend in new cancer cases per 100,000 population is actually slowly declining. Now, let’s look at the numbers for the year 2020, given that COVID-19 vaccines didn’t receive emergency use authorization (EUA) until December of that year and mass vaccination didn’t really take off until early 2021. According to the accompanying data table, the models rate in 2021 (which I use because the actual rate was lower due to disruptions in screening and patient care due to the pandemic in 2020) was 447.5 per 100,000. Now, if Mantaring were correct and the incidence of new cancer cases increased 143,233% due to COVID-19 vaccines, it’s a simple matter to see what that would look like by multiplying 447.5 by the 1,432.33-fold increase claimed by Mantaring. If you do that, you’ll quickly come up with an estimate for incidence of new cancer diagnoses per year of 640, 968 per 100,000, or more than 6.4 times what is possible. That Mantaring didn’t do that sort of basic plausibility check on her number tells me all I need to know about her.

Moreover, even if you accept the idea of “turbo cancer,” in which COVID-19 vaccines are supposedly so carcinogenic that they can cause cancer faster than ionizing radiation (two to ten years, depending on the specific malignancy), you would expect to have started seeing the trend in the numbers by 2022 at least, and the trend couldn’t be the least bit subtle if we were going to achieve the mass death from cancer estimated by Mantaring by this year. Basically, like Makary’s estimate, Mantaring’s estimate doesn’t pass the basic smell test, but even more obviously. Truly, mathematical literacy is not a characteristic of cranks, although at least Makary didn’t produce a number higher than was physically even possible.

Watching the video, I looked for an explanation for how Mantaring came up with her estimate. I was amused by her introduction. Tommey wanted to talk about Mantaring’s sister, but Mantaring wanted to list her credentials, none of which were particularly relevant to her overarching claim regarding cancer. She also pointedly mentioned that when the pandemic hit in March 2020 she was considered an “essential employee” and came to work every day, which is also fairly irrelevant given that it would be expected that laboratory personnel responsible for doing lab tests in a hospital can’t do their jobs remotely. But she did start “following all news, seminars, symposia, and investigations related to the pandemic, the early treatment, the development and approval of the gene-based vaccine, as well as the CDC reporting system.” Impressive, if true, given that the sheer volume of “news, seminars, symposia, and investigations” described would have been beyond the ability of one person to follow them all while doing her job, which more and more sounds like more of a laboratory technician than an investigative scientist.

Of course, because Mantaring performed PCR diagnostics of viral diseases, she claims that she was immediately able to “recognize the government’s continuing fraud and deception in their COVID-19 testing and vaccine policies,” which she characterized as “crimes against humanity” and part of the “World Economic Forum’s diabolical new world agenda.” She also mentions how “fetal cell lines” were used in the manufacture of the vaccines, a longstanding antivax trope that seeks to weaponize religious objections about abortion to sow disgust about vaccines, while going on about the “limited safety data” and supposedly rushed testing—and this all in the first three minutes of the video!

I wasn’t really interested in going over the same old, same old antivax tropes about COVID-19 vaccines, nearly all of which Mantaring hit at one time or another, along with “early treatment protocols” about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which she urged her family and friends not to take the vaccine but to use these repurposed drugs, which do not work. Unsurprisingly, she states that the reason she retired in 2021 was to avoid mandatory COVID-19 vaccination at her job. That is why I basically listened to the video in the background, waiting for something—anything—describing how she had come up with her ridiculously implausible estimate for such a massive increase in cancer incidence being linked to the COVID-19 vaccines.

I did learn, however, that Mantaring’s sister in Toronto was diagnosed with sarcomatoid urothelial carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer of the bladder, “after being fully vaccinated and boostered as mandated by the vaccine passport per the Trudeau government.” Sadly, she couldn’t tolerate the preoperative chemotherapy and was scheduled for surgery in April 2022, at which point it had invaded the uterus and surrounding bowel, requiring more extensive surgery. Eventually it spread to the liver, and her sister died from her disease, seven months from diagnosis. While this is a tragic story, it is not unusual for a cancer like this one, which is aggressive. After this, Mantaring claims that her sister’s story confirmed for her what she had been hearing from people in her circle about cancer in vaccinated people, leading her to go on and on about how spike protein supposedly causes cancer, facilitated by its also causing “vaccine-acquired immune deficiency,” a nonexistent syndrome that antivaxxers like to call VAIDS.

So I listened to the video, wondering if there was any more than the quotes about cancer from COVID vaccines that had been highlighted by The Lioness of Judah and various antivaxxers on X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, and other social media, other than this in response to a question about Tommey why the public “fell in line with” and “obeyed” government vaccine mandates “without thinking” (of course—sheeple!):

Because they trusted the government. They would not think that the government will lie to them. And it’s also a belief that a sophisticated form of medicine from big pharma, no less, big names—Pfizer, AstraZeneca, J&J—you would think, they would have no second thoughts. But what triggered my suspicion was, coming from an immunology background and working in an immunization clinic, we don’t do this. We don’t push out a vaccine with less than a year of trials.

Actually, in a pandemic, we do, and the testing was adequate. Elsewhere, she asks:

How can a government people trust lie to them?

Good question, but few are the people who trust the government never to lie, particularly in our current political climate.

At this point, I was getting tired; so I’m just going to come around to the punchline. Myrna Mantaring doesn’t present any evidence to support her claim that as a result of COVID-19 vaccination cancer cases have increased by 143,233%, other than referring to unnamed and undescribed US government data. Her entire argument on this point boils down to basically, “Trust me, bro.” No, seriously. She doesn’t even show graphs or charts. Even cranks as cranky as William Makis show graphs and charts. They might be poorly conceived, designed, and analyzed graphs and charts, but they are at least an attempt to show evidence. From Mantaring, we get nothing.

It’s worse than that. With a little help from a reader, I was made aware of the origin of the “143,233% increase” in cancer claim, and it’s about what you might have predicted. First, it’s not a new figure. In fact, it’s older than even I had suspected. It comes from a conspiracy website called The Exposé, started in 2020 by a British welder named Jonathan Allen-Walker, and an article published there in August 2022 entitled U.S. Government data confirms a 143,233% increase in Cancer cases due to COVID Vaccination. The analysis involved the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), because of course it did. Basically, the anonymous author of the article examined cancer-related reports to VAERS related to flu vaccines administered from 2008 to 2020 and COVID-19 vaccines administered between December 2020 and August 2022, and came up with this graph:

I’ve explained more times than I can remember why VAERS is not reliable when it comes to estimating population prevalence of a given condition or for linking that condition to vaccines, given the base rate fallacy and thus don’t know the base rate of the given condition to compare the VAERS data to. Moreover, after the release of COVID-19 vaccines, for the first time ever, the CDC publicized VAERS and encouraged reporting adverse events to it, which, to the surprise of no one familiar with VAERS, led to a huge spike in reports of adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccines. Again, this number fails a basic plausibility test, and only the mathematically illiterate would take such an estimate seriously.

As I reach the end, again one might wonder: Why did I bother? Myrna Mantaring is so obviously off the deep end that it seems pointless to discuss a clearly and obviously fantastical estimate for how much COVID-19 vaccines supposedly increase the number of cancer diagnoses. I bothered because, for one thing, to most people it’s not obvious that her estimate is so obviously off the deep end and mathematically impossible. To know that takes background knowledge. For example, just look at some of the responses in The Lioness of Judah’s comments after one commenter suggests that there’s no way the increase is this high, even though that commenter seems clearly to believe that COVID-19 vaccines contribute to cancer:

You get the idea.

In the end, I wrote about this as a basic plea to do a reality check whenever you see a figure that seems implausible or inflated. With Mantaring’s estimate, it’s really easy, which is why I chose it, much the same way that I like to use homeopathy as an example of extreme implausibility. All you have to do is to look up cancer incidence statistics and then see if what she is claiming is even possible. (It isn’t.) For a claim like Marty Makary’s “third leading cause of death” claim about medical errors, it’s trickier. First, you have to parse his claim a bit and realize that it’s only about in-hospital deaths, not all deaths. Then you have to look up the statistics for how many people die in hospitals in the US every year, so that you have something to compare to. Doing that, you will see that, while Makary’s estimate of 250K to 400K deaths due to medical errors in hospitals is possible, it is incredibly implausible that such a high percentage of deaths in hospitals are due to medical errors. If you want to go further, you can then compare Makary’s number to total deaths in the US every year. If you do so, you’ll find that it’s also pretty darned implausible there too, given that at the time there were estimated to be 2.6 million deaths per year in the US; Makary’s estimate would imply that medical errors cause between 10% and 15% of all deaths every year. Even that comparison tells you how implausible Makary’s numbers were; yet almost no one pointed this out, and his “third leading cause of death” factoid became so ubiquitous that even other ostensibly reason-based sources routinely cite it.

Skepticism and critical thinking are your friends, and I hope that this little exercise, even carried out on an estimate from an obvious crank whose argument boils down to “trust me, bro” inspires you to apply such methods to any numbers-based claim that doesn’t sound plausible or correct. Now, if only the press and many of my medical colleagues who still parrot Makary’s figure would do the same thing.