The claim by Moderna’s chief medical officer that vaccines may save millions of lives is misleading and will only fuel the perception that somehow medicine can eliminate death (Cancer and heart disease vaccines ‘ready by end of the decade’, 7 April). This in turn leads to a disproportionate fear of death and a belief that dying is somehow a failure.
There will be instances in which vaccines could prevent young, active people with a good quality of life from developing cancer, which might be welcomed. But cancer is a disease that is much more prevalent in late middle age and in elderly people. In these cases, a vaccine, while preventing someone from dying from cancer, will enable them to live a little bit longer, by which time they will have developed other ailments. They are consigned to living out their latter years while enduring the many debilitating conditions of old age.
In a health service that is stretched financially, we need to be much more realistic about what medicine can and cannot achieve. Scarce resources could prioritise adequate staffing levels and preventive measures rather than hugely expensive new technologies (if no one were obese or smoked, cancer rates would also be vastly reduced). A more timely message for the public would be: we all die and sometimes death is a better outcome than the continuation of life. It is sometimes preferable for medicine to stop curing, but never stop caring.
Dr Tabitha Winnifrith
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
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