No truth in COVID vaccine-related ‘turbo cancer’ warning

AAP FACTCHECK – Social media users are spreading untrue and unsourced claims that Australian “officials” have warned billions are going to die from “turbo cancers” linked to COVID-19 vaccines.

A December 11 article posted on The People’s Voice website with the headline “Australia: ‘Turbo Cancer to Spread Like Wildfire and Kill BILLIONS in 2 years’” has gone viral, with social media posts repeating its claims.

The People’s Voice has been repeatedly debunked by AAP FactCheck.

One Facebook post is captioned: “Turbo Cancer is spreading like wildfire, threatening to kill BILLIONS globally in just 2 years. Australia issues a dire warning as the world faces a catastrophic medical apocalypse. Are vaccines linked to this deadly surge?”

The post’s caption adds that “Australian officials have sounded the alarm” in an “earth-shattering announcement”, in claims lifted straight from the article.

Reuters Fact Check reports cancer specialists have confirmed the term “turbo cancers” is not medically recognised but is often used by vaccine sceptics to link vaccines to forms of aggressive cancer.

New Zealand vaccine expert Helen Petousis-Harris said “turbo cancer” is a term loosely thrown around by conspiracy theorists.

No Australian officials are quoted on turbo cancers in the People’s Voice article. In fact, there is no evidence provided at all to back up the article’s main claim.

A search for the term “turbo cancer” on the websites of both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Department of Health failed to turn up any results in press releases, speeches, statements or messages, nor could AAP FactCheck find any reports of a pending “turbo cancer” outbreak by Australian media organisations.

The only person quoted in the article to back up the claim is Ian Brighthope, an integrative medicine advocate the article describes as “one of Australia’s most renowned doctors”.

Professor Brighthope is featured in a video version of the report embedded in the article and is identified as a “professor of nutritional and environmental medicine” (4 minutes 55 seconds) – not a virologist or epidemiologist.

The clip is taken from a talk Prof Brighthope gave at The Great Debate in Perth on November 29, 2024, where he repeated debunked claims linking an increase in cancers with “rogue residual DNA” in vials of the COVID vaccine.

In the address, Prof Brighthope mentions turbo cancers (19:53) but he does not claim in the speech that billions will be killed by them.

The article makes several other claims, including that there was “no pandemic”.

The claim is false. A February 2020 paper stated that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, was found to have caused a large outbreak since December 2019 in China, and “SARS-CoV-2 infections have been reported with epidemiological linkage to China in 25 countries since December 2019”.

Meanwhile a report in the Journal of Virology in May 2020 said since emerging in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 “has hence spread worldwide causing a global pandemic”.

According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 dashboard, a cumulative total of 7.1 million global deaths from COVID were reported to the WHO by December 1, 2024. There were 25,200 in Australia and 4,500 in New Zealand.

The article also falsely claims that COVID vaccines are “toxic gene therapy”.

Full Fact has explained it is incorrect to describe COVID mRNA vaccines as gene therapy, which is a specific area of medicine targeting genetic diseases.

A statement by Australia’s Office of the Gene Technology Regulator also confirms mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are not gene therapies.

While a gene therapy is a medicine to modify a gene to treat or cure a disease, the statement says, a vaccine is a medicine that causes an immune response in the body to help it recognise and fight viruses or disease.

Although messenger RNA can be part of a gene therapy or a vaccine, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines do not contain the machinery to modify a gene in the body.

The article also links the death of a Fox News health commentator, Kelly Powers, to the vaccine.

Ms Powers died of an aggressive form of brain cancer on December 1, 2024, as outlined in an AFP Fact Check article debunking the claim.

Ms Powers was diagnosed with glioblastoma in July 2020. The first COVID vaccine was not given emergency use authorisation in the US by the Food & Drug Administration until December 2020.

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