- Experts are uncertain how effective COVID-19 vaccines are for people being treated for cancer and those who have survived the disease.
- One reason is that people with cancer have not been included in COVID-19 vaccine trials.
- Some studies have indicated there’s some immune response for people with cancer after a COVID-19 vaccination, but the reaction might not be as strong as it is in the general population.
Since the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials began, people being treated for cancer and those who have survived the disease have been largely excluded.
Two prominent cancer organizations are now insisting this must change.
In a joint statement, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and Friends of Cancer Research (FCR) announced that individuals with active cancer or a history of cancer must be made eligible for COVID-19 vaccine trials unless there is a safety justification for exclusion.
“We’ve learned that patients with cancer are especially vulnerable to severe illness, hospitalization, or death due to COVID-19,” Dr. Everett E. Vokes, president of ASCO, said in the joint statement.
“However, since clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines have largely excluded patients with cancer, we still have a long way to go to better understand how safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines are for patients in active treatment,” he added.
Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer of ASCO and a medical breast cancer oncologist for 30 years, told Healthline that there is a great need to learn more about how cancer and the novel coronavirus interact.
“Early in the development of the vaccines, it, of course, made sense to try to get healthy population to start within these trials,” Gralow said.
“But once you have positive signals, once you have locked that in, it is supercritical to adjust eligibility in subsequent trials or expand cohorts to more vulnerable and underserved populations, including those who are not healthy,” she added.
Gralow said that because these trials to date enrolled narrower, more homogenous patient populations, many of the most vulnerable and underserved people don’t know if the vaccines are safe or effective for them.
She said ASCO has begun to collect data over the past couple of months on people with cancer and the COVID-19 vaccines.
“The vast majority, including patients with solid tumors, have good immune responses to the vaccines,” Gralow said. “But we are finding high-risk populations, including in hematological malignancies: B cell malignancies, lymphoma, multiple myeloma. Some of them have a response, but they are generally at lower levels.”
People with blood cancers who are being treated with the drug Rituxan have particularly low response rates to the vaccine, according to Gralow.
“It’s not zero. But it’s low,” she said. “We are also seeing this with CAR-T cell immunotherapies and stem cell transplants. But in regular chemo, we have not seen any big problems.”
Source: healthline