Harvey Risch, a Yale epidemiologist long respected for his work in cancer research but who has faced controversy for promoting an unproven covid-19 treatment, has been selected by President Donald Trump to lead the nation’s cancer initiative.
Over the course of his career, Risch published 400 original peer-reviewed research papers most notably on cancer prevention and early detection, and has studied a wide array of malignancies including ovarian, pancreatic, lung, bladder, esophageal and stomach cancers. He has also served as an editor at several of the field’s leading journals.
Risch, a professor emeritus and senior research scientist at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, will serve as chairman of the President’s Cancer Panel. The advisory group helps make recommendations on cancer-related policies and monitors the National Cancer Program, which was created in 1971 to coordinate research nationwide.
Risch “plans to accelerate American innovations in cancer prevention and increase the public’s awareness of reproductive, dietary, occupational, environmental, and immune system-related factors that influence cancer etiology,” according to the announcement this week by the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Dr. Risch brings the expertise and resolve needed to identify the root causes of cancer in America,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.
In recent years, Risch has become a public figure for very different reasons. In 2023, on an audio segment Risch hosted on “America Out Loud,” a conservative podcast network, he speculated about a connection between the covid vaccine and “turbo cancer” in young adults despite being no clinical evidence of a connection. And during the pandemic in 2020 his advocacy of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial, as a covid treatment drew sharp criticism from medical experts.
In May of that year, Risch wrote a paper in the American Journal of Epidemiologyand in July an opinion piece in Newsweek arguing that the drug should be used early in high-risk patients with symptomatic covid.
The argument aligned with Trump’s own enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine, which he famously called a “game changer” and said he was taking daily, along with zinc, as a preventive measure. At the same time, U.S. health officials and the Food and Drug Administration were urging the public not to use the drug, citing a lack of demonstrated benefit and the potential for serious side effects, including dangerous heart-rhythm disruptions.
Risch’s position prompted a letter from his own Yale colleagues, who expressed “grave concern,” and a rebuttal in the American Journal of Epidemiology from Matthew P. Fox, a Boston University epidemiologist, who wrote that pushing the view “in the face of this evidence is irresponsible and harmful to the many people already suffering from infection.”
On Wednesday, Fox said that while he disagreed with some of Risch’s opinions related to covid, that Risch is “a very capable and strong epidemiologist with decades of experience in epidemiologic methods and work on cancer specifically.”
“My hope is that he will use his expertise for the good of advancing cancer prevention and treatment with a focus on using rigorous evidence to support policy that will ensure a better future for cancer in the U.S. and around the world,” Fox said.
Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research, said that Risch “clearly has solid academic credentials.” But that Risch’s views linking covid vaccines and cancer … “are baseless, without any meaningful evidence, and quite worrisome.”
Risch would be working alongside Anthony Letai, a Harvard Medical School professor and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute oncologist who was sworn in as director of the National Cancer Institute in September.
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