Monday Morning Optimism 5/1/2023

Cancer Vaccines

Welcome to our Monday Morning Optimism series. To start each week, we’ll send you an economic trend/fact/idea that shows how some aspect of the economy (or world) has improved over time.

Moderna and Merck are making progress on developing a cancer vaccine:

“About 79% of high-risk melanoma patients who got the personalized vaccine and Merck’s immunotherapy Keytruda were alive and cancer-free at 18 months, compared with about 62% of patients who received immunotherapy alone, researchers said Sunday. The 157-person trial offers some of the strongest evidence yet that such vaccines could benefit cancer patients.”

Over the past two decades, the age-adjusted cancer death rate has fallen from about 200 deaths per 100,000 people to 144/100,000 people.

Cancer accounted for a fairly constant share of deaths from 1999 to 2010. Over the past decade, though, the share of deaths caused by cancer fell pretty steadily (ignore the 2020 point where COVID inflated the denominator).

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