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mRNA Vaccine Advances Melanoma Care Amid Growing Vaccine Hesitancy
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Released: August 28, 2026

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD
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mRNA Vaccine Advances Melanoma Care Amid Growing Vaccine Hesitancy

John Marshall, MD: Happy end of summer. John Marshall here with Oncology Unscripted, and I am so glad that you decided to waste a little bit of your time with me. What have you done this summer? Did you take a big trip to Europe, maybe, or did you just take some time off? Are you a beach person? Did you put your SPF on? Maybe you’re there now. There are a lot of people who go out in August, particularly here in Washington.

I don’t know if you know, but this is the lowest-traffic month in Washington, DC. But what have we done? This coming weekend, we’re having an Indianapolis 500–kind of race in downtown Washington, where the current administration has taken an area right in front of the Capitol, in front of the Smithsonians and all of that, and built this racetrack that’s going to happen on Sunday morning.

So, I guess those on the religious right are fine with having a car race on Sunday morning. They’re going to close National Airport for 4 hours while the cars go round and round. They’re worried that things are going to fall off of the museum shelves, and so they’re really nervous about that.

Maybe there will be a bad car wreck. What is that going to do with 200,000 people down there watching it in the heat this coming Sunday? So, stay tuned for the Sunday night news to see what happened here in Washington. Hopefully nothing, and hopefully all goes smoothly, but we are a bit nervous here in Washington, which is why so many people have left town and traffic is low.

But it’s also back-to-school time here in the DC area, and I’m sure it’s the same where you are. And one of the news pieces that came out, of course, is that we all have to have our kids vaccinated in order to go to school. We check them. You have to have a reason why you didn’t get them if you didn’t get them, but there are requirements.

There are requirements for our staff here in the hospital to have certain vaccines every year. We’re required to make sure we get them. But, of course, there is a major discussion going on in this country about whether vaccines are a good thing or whether vaccines are somehow a bad thing and are causing other downstream problems—worries about certain learning disabilities and all sorts of things that have been brought up that certain people are claiming are caused by vaccines.

And so, we now have new regulations here in this region. The federal government has put out new regulations that actually reduce the number of vaccines that children are supposed to get before they go to school. This is at the same time we’re also seeing, in the next column over, the increase in measles outbreaks that is going on around the country. In the international pages out there, we’re seeing all of these outbreaks of Ebola virus in Africa.

And I’ve been reflecting on my 34th year on the faculty, with residency before that. When I first showed up here, this hospital was full of a bunch of young men who were dying of HIV, of AIDS, and that’s what I first learned on. And it was Anthony Fauci and many others who actually pushed through how to help develop new treatments against that virus and the struggle against that.

More recently, we’ve all lived through the COVID-19 wave. And so, for those who said it didn’t happen, those of us with white coats on—I’m wearing mine today; I’ve been a doctor today—you know, we remember that it was not something that was fake. Our hospitals all of a sudden filled with people. We turned normal floors into ICUs, for example, so we could take care of this wave of people who were suffering and dying from COVID-19. We also remember the treatments of that and the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.

At the same time, we’re reading over here about lettuce infestations from the parasite Cyclospora, and what’s the federal government doing about that? Well, it’s kind of dragging its feet as well in trying to intervene or go down and check it out to make sure that the food is safe. So, I am nervous about our current belief system about what’s true in medicine and in health care, and what is not true or what’s harmful out there.

Then, just for fun, there was a recent article around AI, artificial intelligence, creating a virus itself that could invade, right?

So, now we have created this AI over here that’s not only invading itself but also is creating viruses that maybe are our undoing, ultimately. And then, at the end of this story, a very recent paper just came out. It’s probably too late to invest in the stock because it already is affecting the stock price, if you will. But there is a messenger RNA vaccine—remember that one when the COVID-19 stuff was out?—that has just shown positive effects in melanoma. And this, of course, by Merck and Moderna, has just been announced—not the data so much, but the press release about how using that messenger RNA vaccine is, in fact, helping to delay recurrences and maybe, ultimately, help cure more people.

And I do wonder: if those people who were afraid to get the COVID-19 vaccine, messenger RNA vaccine, now have melanoma, would they also be afraid to get that one, even though it’s shown in this randomized clinical trial to have improved outcomes? And so, I do think we have a very, very upside-down world when it comes to de-harnessing our immune system, exposing our immune system to as many things as we can, enriching our microbiome in a way that gives us an even healthier immune system.

And our interview this time was with Daniel Lieberman, who’s focused on nutrition and diets and the impact on our health. And I think we, as health care providers, have really fallen behind in understanding more about the microbiome and how to feed and stimulate our immune system, even apart from the virus work that we have done before.

So, I am unsettled as we go back to school in the fall of 2026, with fewer children having vaccines, with more emerging resistant infections that are out there, and a public that’s not sure which is the right way to go. But hopefully, we will have a good year ahead. Do your homework, kids.

And hopefully, a year from now, we will be able to say that we are indeed all a bit smarter and all, hopefully, a little bit healthier. John Marshall for Oncology Unscripted.

This transcript was generated by AI and lightly edited for clarity.