Let The Pink Vaccine Speak For Itself

By Dr. Kathleen T. Ruddy

The first preventive breast cancer vaccine developed by Professor Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic has been controversial since Tuohy’s data were published in Nature Medicine in May 2010.  Apparently the vaccine was so controversial, despite its safety and efficacy in animals studies, that all the traditional funding sources refused to support it.  Fortunately, this impasse has passed.  With the announcement from the Cleveland Clinic that funds are now available to bring Tuohy’s vaccine forward into clinical trials to see if the vaccine is safe for use in women, and if safe, effective in treating and preventing breast cancer, the controversy appears to be heating up.  So be it.  I have no problem with controversy, per se.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion.  That’s the American way.  I respect that.  I admire it.  And, to be sure, I exercise it here and elsewhere often enough to be quite sure of its enduring value.

But I think controversy over the vaccine is rather a waste of time, for the question of the potential of this vaccine is not a matter of opinion, as if it were a passage from the Old Testament open to interpretation, but the proper subject of a scientific investigation.  We don’t need a panel of talmudic scholars to render a judgment about the worth of the vaccine:  what we need is a clinical trial.  And now we have the funds for that.  A scientific study that tests the vaccine for safety and efficacy in women is the proper arbiter of its worth, so let’s go with that and allow the vaccine speak for itself.

I, for one, can’t wait to hear what it has to say.