Lee Camp: How News of a Cure for Cancer Got Lost in Our Nightly Political
Theater
They found a way to detect cancer years before symptoms arise.
Hypothetically this could save millions upon millions of lives. So why is it
not plastered all over our nightly news?
by Lee Camp
August 27th, 2020
By Lee Camp
Donald Trump speeches. Celebrity tweets. Corporate news repetition. Chaos.
Vapidity. Manufactured dissent. Graphic fighting sports.
This is what fills our field of vision. It consumes our thoughts, overflows
our brains with anti-intellectual mud. Yet most of these things are the bug
splatter across the windshield. They are not the actual highway, the path
forward, actually deserving of our focus.
Looking beyond these distractions, one can see what really matters. The true
stuff of life and death and oppression and justice. Most of it is not
"trending" on Twitter. Most of it doesn't get the meme treatment. None of it
is matched with dance numbers, going viral on Tik-Tok. But it's there.
Waiting. Waiting for most of us to care. Waiting for us to evolve.
I believe one of those issues is the fact that scientists just cured cancer.
well, not quite. But kinda.
They found a way to detect cancer years before symptoms arise, which
generally means when it's exponentially more treatable. Hypothetically this
could save millions upon millions of lives. So why is it not plastered all
over our nightly news? Why can I still flip on a cable news show without
hearing about this??
The cold hard truth is there's not enough money in stopping cancer quickly.
No, not much money at all. Far better to drag cancer ooouuuuut - keep it
goin' - like a bad relationship. Why get divorced quickly and move on?
Better to make each other miserable for a couple years, arguing over who
gets stuff neither of us cares about - like that old armchair, cookbooks
we've never used, torn drapes, the kids, etc.
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I'll get to how scientists can now predict cancer in a moment. But let's
back up. According to the National Cancer Institute, "In 2020, roughly 1.8
million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States. And an
estimated 606,520 people will die of cancer this year in the U.S."
Six hundred thousand people. That's more than watched the Avengers movies!
(Not really. Actually way more watched the Avengers. But still, you get the
point.) And for now let's ignore that a lot of that cancer is caused by
massive corporations utterly destroying our natural world, dumping oil and
toxins in our faces. (I'll cover that some other time when, you know, it's a
slow news day or I have, like, a Tuesday off for a little "me-cation," as I
call it when I like to paint my toenails.)
In 2017, globally 9.6 million people were estimated to have died from the
various forms of cancer. Every sixth death in the world is due to cancer,
making it the second leading cause of death."
Second only to eating White Castle and then listening to a Kanye West
presidential campaign speech. Point is cancer kills a lot of people. Many of
the most fatal cases are because people don't realize they have it until
it's too late. Well, Scientific American reports a new experimental blood
test detects cancer four years before symptoms emerge. Four full years. They
tested ".more than 123,000 healthy individuals in Taizhou, China, which
required building a specialized warehouse to store the more than 1.6 million
samples they eventually accrued." (That must be a truly gross warehouse.
Samples of what?)
Over the following 10 years, around 1,000 participants got cancer and using
the new blood test, the researchers knew up to four years in advance which
participants would get it with a 90 percent accuracy. They knew! The
researchers looked at the test and said, "This person will get cancer years
from now." I find this utterly incredible and you should too. Having the
capability to know who is going to get cancer long before symptoms arise
would save millions of lives. So why aren't we rushing this through? This
could save more lives than curing Coronavirus. Why have I only seen one
article about it? Why is it not plastered across Brian Williams' forehead or
Sean Hannity's tits?
Could it be - hypothetically - that there's not wall-to-wall reporting on
this because there's too much money in treating cancer?
Most people cannot comprehend how much Americans spend on cancer treatment.
A 2018 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that 42 percent of
new cancer patients spent their whole life savings in just two years after
they first got their diagnosis. Furthermore, ".the direct medical costs from
cancer exceed $80 billion [per year] in the United States. .more than 50% of
cancer patients at some point experience bankruptcy and house repossession."
Eighty billion fucking dollars.
Spent every year by Americans trying to survive cancer.
For the people making money from this, getting rich from this, buying
gourmet steaks for their pure-bred dog that wins contests that shouldn't
exist - for those people, letting go of that money is not on the agenda. And
they know it would look bad to run around chanting, "Don't cure cancer! I
have three mortgages and yacht payments! What do we want? CANCER! When do we
want it? NOW!" They know that looks bad. So instead big pharma and big
insurance and the big Wall Street players - they quietly avoid funding the
kind of research that would help end cancer as opposed to treating cancer.
And this is not a conspiracy theory. We have the proof. The leaked Goldman
Sachs memo to top investors telling them not to invest in cures because
curing illnesses is bad for business.
And cancer doesn't only destroy people without health insurance. Back to the
study in the American Journal of Medicine, "Even for those with health
insurance," the researchers wrote, "Deductibles and co-payments for
treatment, supportive care, and nonmedical or indirect costs (e.g., travel,
caregiver time, and lost productivity) may be financially devastating even
with health care coverage.'"
Furthermore, this is not the only advancement in cancer research we don't
hear about in America. For example, Cuba has a lung cancer vaccine that
Americans can't get. One of the few mainstream articles about it gave the
example of an American named George Keays. USA Today reported, "Keays has
stage 4 lung cancer. As his treatment options appeared to be dwindling this
fall, he went to Cuba for a vaccine treatment despite a federal law that
prohibits Americans from going there for health care."
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This caught me off guard. I knew our federal government behaved like a
psychopath who loves his mom so the neighbors assume he's a nice guy. But I
didn't know we had a federal law prohibiting Americans from getting
healthcare. I can only assume that was passed the same day they passed that
law requiring daycares send children to play with the used needles under the
wharf by the condemned asbestos plant.
Where does the "Don't Get Healthcare Law" fit on our freedom matrix?
Shouldn't we have the freedom to get whatever healthcare treatment we want?
Shouldn't even Republicans support that? If someone thinks they'll fix the
arm they lost in a wheat thresher accident by shoving a magic crystal up
their ass, shouldn't they have the freedom to do it? I mean, it's not for
me, but I'm not going to stop you (assuming you scrub down the crystal
afterwards). Point is - we aren't free. We aren't even free to get good
healthcare.
So when it comes to incredible advancements in cancer science, where is
Congress? Congress will stop everything to make sure more money gets
unceremoniously dumped into our Military Industrial Complex each year.
They'll come back from vacation, skip their daughter's graduation, and miss
out on their father's funeral just to pour more cash into fighter jets or to
pass bills designed to destroy the people of Venezuela and Syria. They'll
come sprinting back to Congress - leaving their toddler sitting on the
swing-set, lightly blowing in the wind - just to make sure people in other
countries die from our economic brutality. But they can't be bothered to
speed up approval of blood tests that prevent cancer. Neither can our
corporate media. Because they don't serve us. They serve corporate state
interests. And curing cancer is not in the interest of the corporate state.