Vaccine skeptics baselessly blame Covid-19 shots for Biden cancer diagnosis

"It meets all the definitional criteria for being a turbo cancer. Remember, Biden took, publicly took, six Covid-19 shots," says Peter McCullough, an American cardiologist who has for years pushed vaccine and health misinformation, in a video shared May 19, 2025 on X.

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Screenshot from X taken May 20, 2025

Similar claims tore across X and other platforms, including Facebook, with the first posts mentioning "turbo cancer" appearing online within minutes of the former president's cancer diagnosis announcement, according to the misinformation monitoring service NewsGuard.

Some posts shared photos of the 82-year-old Democrat receiving Covid-19 vaccines or booster shots during his presidency.

The narrative also spread via dubious websites such as "The People's Voice," which AFP has repeatedly fact-checked for amplifying Covid-19 misinformation.

"Joe Biden Diagnosed With 'Aggressive Turbo Cancer' One Month After 4th Booster Shot," reads the outlet's headline.

Biden was diagnosed with an "aggressive" form of prostate cancer after he experienced urinary issues and a prostate nodule was found, his office said in a statement May 18. The cancer is already well advanced, having spread to his bones.

There is no evidence, however, that Biden's disease is a "turbo cancer" -- an invented term that is not medically recognized but instead used by vaccine skeptics seeking to link Covid-19 shots to fast-developing cancers.

Similar claims have trailed Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales and other public figures who received cancer diagnoses since the pandemic.

'Myth'

According to medical authorities including the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society, there has been no evidence to suggest that the approved Covid-19 vaccines can cause cancer to grow or recur (archived here and here).

The Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center both call such claims a "myth" on their websites (archived here and here).

"There is no credible evidence that the Covid-19 vaccine and boosters cause any type of cancer," Otis Brawley, an oncologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told AFP in a May 20 email (archived here). "There is not even a scientifically plausible mechanism through which the vaccine could cause a cancer."

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year in the United States, Brawley said.

"This was occurring for years, really decades, before there was a Covid vaccine," he said.

'Not unusual'

The timing of Biden's diagnosis has fueled some speculation, including from President Donald Trump, that the former knew of his condition earlier but concealed it.

Prostate cancer, the most common among men, is typically diagnosed much sooner (archived here).

But oncologists told AFP the late identification of advanced cancer would not be unheard of, even for someone receiving top medical care.

"We can't rule out the possibility that it was an aggressive form that developed quickly," Natacha Naoun, an oncologist with France's Gustave-Roussy Institute, told AFP May 19 (archived here).

While prostate cancer can be caught in its early stages using blood tests that measure for a protein called PSA, annual PSA screening after the age of 70 is not universally recommended (archived here). The US Preventive Services Task Force advises against it, reasoning that the risk of false positives and the harms from biopsies and treatment outweigh the benefits for people in that age group (archived here).

"It could be they decided to stop checking PSA annually, and then he had urinary symptoms," said Russell Pachynski, an oncologist with Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who told AFP in a May 19 email that prostate cancer patients do not always experience telltale pains or signs (archived here).

It is also possible that Biden was undergoing routine screenings, but that those checks failed to turn up indications of cancer, Pachynski said.

"Maybe it was just unlucky that his particular cancer didn't express a lot of PSA and he still had a normal PSA. In that setting, you would not go checking the prostate or do a biopsy, etcetera, unless it was driven by symptoms."

Brawley, from Johns Hopkins University, said both PSA testing and rectal exams are imperfect. 

"It is not unusual for a man to be diagnosed with metastatic prostate disease despite normal annual screening," he told AFP in a May 19 email. "This is part of the limitations of prostate screening."

AFP has debunked other misinformation about vaccines here.