On the vaccine:

Anon is not opposed to all vaccines, but until more data is out on the covid vaccine, I will abstain. That said, I would never tell someone else not to take it. That is a personal decision.

Did catching Covid-19 help these patients fight cancer? One saw his tumours vanish, another went into remission. Now doctors are asking if their immune response was key - and if it could also be triggered by the vaccine

When doctors at a hospital in Cornwall carried out a follow-up check last summer on a 61-year-old man recently diagnosed with cancer, they found something extraordinary.

The tumours, which scans just a few weeks earlier revealed were littering his torso, had almost gone.

The patient, who was unnamed but was featured in a paper in the British Journal of Haematology, had not yet started chemotherapy for the disease, called Hodgkin lymphoma — a type of blood cancer that affects about 2,100 people a year in the UK.

So the sudden disappearance of the cancerous cells that had riddled his body was a complete mystery.

Spontaneous remission of this type of cancer does occur but it’s incredibly rare; only a couple of dozen cases, from all over the world, have ever been recorded.

But there was one possible — albeit quite incredible — explanation for his cancer’s vanishing act. Just a few days after receiving his diagnosis, the patient was admitted to hospital with severe Covid-19.

After testing positive for the virus, he developed pneumonia, inflammation of the lungs caused by the viral infection.

He was put on oxygen to help him breathe while his lungs recuperated, and kept in hospital for 11 days, before being discharged home, fully recovered.

It was a few weeks later that a CT scan to check his cancer revealed it had all but gone.

The conclusion his doctors reached was extraordinary; Covid-19 had destroyed his cancer by firing up his immune system enough not just to see off the virus but to attack and destroy malignant cells, too.

Dr Sarah Challoner, one of the doctors treating the cancer at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro, said in the published report: ‘We think Covid-19 triggered an anti-tumour immune response.’

She believes that infection-fighting cells, called T-cells, released on a large scale by the immune system to try to see off the coronavirus also attacked cancer cells which it recognised as ‘foreign’.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9462981/amp/Did-catching-Covid-19-help-patients-fight-cancer.html?