Is Russia The Only Country With A Cancer Vaccine?

On September, 14 2025, an X user @Vladimir Putin News claimed that Russia is the only country with a cancer vaccine. The post had an image of a Vaccine bottle labelled Cancer Vaccine, made in Russia with the caption, “Russia is the only country in the world that has cancer vaccines and it’s free”.

When this report was published, this claim had about 351,000 views and over 12,300 replies, reposts, quotes, likes and bookmarks.

VERIFICATION

Russian health officials announced the development of a personalised mRNA-based therapeutic cancer vaccine in December 2024. According to reports, the vaccine targets specific tumour mutations and was to become available to Russian patients for free starting in 2025.

HPV vaccine which protects against cervical cancer is already in use across many countries, including the US, UK, Nigeria, India, and more. 

In the United States, the FDA approved Provenge (sipuleucel-T) in 2010 as a therapeutic vaccine for advanced prostate cancer. BioNTech (Germany) is running clinical trials of mRNA vaccines targeting melanoma, pancreatic, and colorectal cancers.

In May 2024, University of Florida reported in the journal Cell, the discovery of a potentially new way to recruit the immune system to fight notoriously treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines. A year before this, the University of Oxford announced the launch of a new mRNA cancer vaccine trial for patients with head and neck cancers.

CONCLUSION

The claim that Russia is the only country with a cancer vaccine is FALSE. Russia has announced a therapeutic cancer vaccine to be offered free from 2025, but it is not the only country with cancer vaccines. The HPV Vaccine is already widely used, often for free and therapeutic vaccines also exist or are in trial in other countries and institutions.