Moderna vaccine doubles survival rate!

 A recent article in the highly regarded journal Nature reports on a study of 884 lung cancer patients being treated with immunotherapy (e.g. Pembrolizumab/Keytruda) between Jan 2015 and Sep 2022 of which 180 had been vaccinated with an MRNA Covid vaccine (e.g. Moderna) within 100 days of starting their immunotherapy.  The patients who had been vaccinated had almost twice the overall 3 year survival rate (55.7%) compared to those who were not vaccinated (30.8%). So more than half of those who were vaccinated lived at least 3 years, while less than a third of those without an mRNA vaccine survived 3 years.

Here is a link to the article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09655-y and here is a figure which shows the number of patients still alive as a function of time. The blue line is for patients who had the Covid mRNA vaccine, the red line for those who didn't. We see that over half of vaccinated patients were alive after 3 years (blue line) but less than a third of the unvaccinated patients (red line).

This is great news for me because I got my Moderna mRNA Covid19 vaccine on 10/8/2025 and I started Keytruda on 10/21/2025. I also had a high fever and 3 hours of chills after that first infusion, so perhaps my immune system was highly stimulated.

You could reasonably argue that this is an observational study and so shows a correlation but doesn't provide evidence that the vaccine doubles the effectiveness of Pembrolizumab/Keytruda.  That is correct, but the paper also discusses their work using mouse models where they look into how the mRNA vaccines impact the immune system of mice and they see that it causes the tumor cells to produce more of the protein PDL-1 which is an indicator of how effective immunotherapy will be.  They also did an indepth analysis of possible confounding variables (looking at 37 different variables) and found no evidence that there was some other variable causing this effect. There are plans for a Clinical Trial, but I would have ethical concerns about such a trial considering the observational results are so strong.