Pfizer Inc. funded presentations to Canadian health professionals earlier this year that claimed rival COVID-19 vaccines could cause cancer and were inappropriate for immunocompromised people — claims that experts say were not true.
The pharmaceutical giant stresses that it had no input into the online tutorials and no intention to sabotage competitors, but at least one prominent scientist has said the presentations spread the kind of misinformation that fuels vaccine hesitancy.
The talks given to groups of pharmacists, doctors and other health workers between at least February and July of this year discussed the various COVID vaccines, though with a focus on Pfizer’s mRNA shot, one of the most effective, safe and widely used today.
A slide in the Powerpoint presentations listed two advantages for a different type of vaccine — which uses “viral vector” technology — and six disadvantages. The first claimed disadvantage was a risk that they could cause “chromosomal integration” and “oncogenesis” — turning healthy cells into cancerous ones. The second was that they could not be used on immunocompromised people.
Viral vector vaccines employ a modified and harmless virus that, injected into the body, prompts cells to produce parts of the virus causing COVID, which then trigger an immune response to the pathogen.
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