In-Depth: Cancer and the COVID-19 vaccines: What you should know
Recommendations vary with different treatments
Source: CNN
and last updated 2021-02-17 20:04:29-05
SAN DIEGO (KGTV) Starting next month, California will offer COVID-19 vaccines to people with high-risk underlying conditions like cancer.
A lot of cancer patients have questions. Should you delay the vaccine if youâre undergoing chemotherapy? What happens if you get the vaccine while your immune system is shot?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers limited guidance. Vaccine makers excluded people with compromised immune systems from their trials.
For the roughly 17 million Americans who previously had cancer and beat it, the advice is simple: get the shot when it is offered to you.
You’d think that a decrease in cancer diagnoses over the past few months would be good news.
Dig deeper, though, and a more complex truth emerges: It means that preventive medical care has declined since the coronavirus pandemic began.
With stay-at-home orders and concerns about COVID-19 transmission, many people have put off medical screenings. Because cancer and other diseases don’t take vacations, experts urge people not to take time off from routine medical care.
“There has been an estimated 46 percent drop in the number of cancer diagnoses in the U.S. since last spring,” said Thomas Buchholz, M.D., medical director of the Scripps MD Anderson Cancer Center in San Diego. “That’s a direct consequence of postponing screenings. We’re open for safe cancer screenings. We’ve taken care that screenings, colonoscopies and other tests are safe, so that if people are confronted by cancer, they will be able to tackle it early.