Is the COVID Vaccine Safe and Effective for Advanced Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Patients?

Related Resources:

What Is Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer?

What Are Treatment Goals and Considerations for Advanced Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer?

A Review of Current Advanced Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Treatment Options

Transcript:

Katherine:                  

Is the COVID vaccine safe and effective for advanced non-melanoma skin cancer patients?

Dr. Sondak:                

I’ve spent my entire career studying the human immune system and vaccines for cancer. The COVID vaccine is the safest, most effective vaccine we have ever seen. It is like the difference between the Wright brothers airplane and the Apollo spaceships in terms of sophistication.

It is a vaccine that has gotten politicized and has gotten tangled up in all kinds of stuff. But again, it is the safest, most effective vaccine we’ve ever seen. I highly recommend it for all of our patients. I believe that all of our patients with cancer, and their family members, and their children of appropriate age should be vaccinated and boosted.

Even if you do that, as I have done, I go vaccinated, I got boosted, and I got COVID. It was milder than the usual cold I get every year before COVID. If I hadn’t been tested, I wouldn’t have even known I had it. I only get tested to avoid spreading it to family members and especially to vulnerable patients. If your immune system is weakened and it’s even more important to be vaccinated.

So, the only advice I give to my patients about the vaccine, and the vaccination specifically, is think about which arm to have it in. If you’ve got an active cancer, say in the left arm, have it in the right arm. Not because it will hurt the cancer, but because in the early days after the vaccine, you may get a little bit of swelling of the lymph nodes. We don’t want your doctor or anybody doing a CAT scan, or ultrasound, or mammogram, or any other test to accidentally think that those enlarged lymph nodes are from the cancer.

If you had the vaccine recently and are getting any type of diagnostic procedure, like a CAT scan mammogram or ultrasound of those lymph nodes, tell the team that you had a recent COVID vaccine.

Katherine:                  

That’s excellent advice. Thank you. Good to know.