Does COVID Cause Leukemia?

Can a COVID-19 infection or vaccination cause or “trigger” leukemia?

This is a question I have often asked myself. My family and I were all vaccinated for COVID-19 multiple times between 2020 and 2021, and then we all contracted COVID while returning from a family trip to the UK in December 2021. We experienced mild symptoms, and didn’t think much of it at the time. We even thought it was kind of funny that we had gone to so much effort to avoid getting COVID, and then we all got it anyway!

Then Jackson was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia in March of 2022.

To say a leukemia diagnosis is a shock is a massive understatement…your loved one is healthy one day, and then fighting for their life while undergoing induction chemotherapy a few days later. Leaving family and friends to wonder: How did this happen? Why did this happen? Should we have gotten the vaccine? Should we have traveled so soon after the pandemic?

It’s human nature to look for someone, or something, to blame. Given the timing (and this must have happened to tens of thousands of people from 2020-2022) one would quite naturally suspect COVID.

As a parent who lost a 22-year-old son to leukemia, I can attest to the fact that it’s easy to second guess yourself: Should we have gotten the vaccine? Should we have traveled so soon after the pandemic?

I see posts almost daily in leukemia forums and Facebook groups claiming that COVID or COVID vaccines cause leukemia. This is neither accurate, nor is it fair or kind to the thousands of struggling patients and grieving loved ones affected by this terrible disease.

So I set out to answer this question, conclusively, for myself. I share my results here with the hope that it may help other parents, spouses, loved ones, or patients dispel any looming doubts.

I’ve searched extensively for scholarly articles looking into the possible correlation between COVID and leukemia, and there aren’t many (I explain why below). One I frequently stumble upon is by Costa et al. published in Hematology, Transfusion and Cell Therapy Volume 44, Issue 1, January–March 2022 titled Can SARS-CoV-2 induce hematologic malignancies in predisposed individuals?

The authors concluded: “Despite the advances in pathophysiological and clinical characterization of COVID-19, the consequences of the pandemic to the incidence of hematologic diseases are still to be elucidated. In this context, future dissection of the status of the local bone marrow renin-angiotensin system in leukemogenesis is a clinically relevant basic research area.“

In other words: “Maybe – Maybe not. We couldn’t tell one way or the other. It’s too soon to tell. But we should probably look into this more”.

[Note: I’ve reached out to the authors for comment and await a response.]

Years later, it seems not many researchers have taken up this path of inquiry, so I set out to figure out why. The answer is very obvious when you look at the data:

The rate of leukemia diagnoses in the U.S. has remained quite stable from 2015 through 2025. There was no uptick in leukemia in 2020, 2021, 2022, or beyond, despite the fact that over 100 million people contracted COVID-19, and over 672 million people were vaccinated for it, between 2020 and 2022.

The U.S. government largely ceased tracking individual COVID cases and called the pandemic over in 2023, so the yearly COVID numbers get fuzzy after that. But we certainly have enough hard data from 2020-2022 to draw some conclusions with very high confidence.

The Mountain vs The Road: A look at the data from COVID vis-à-vis leukemia

It’s difficult to even chart the data comparing COVID cases and vaccines to leukemia cases, because new leukemia cases tend to hover around 60,000 per year in the U.S., and when you try to plot that against tens of millions of cases per year for COVID (or over 600 million vaccinations), the scale is difficult to convey. Google’s AI, Gemini, insightfully pointed out that “it’s like trying to compare a mountain to a road” (more on that below):

The numbers are so disparate, it’s actually helpful to look at a table (this is the same data represented in the chart above):

Sources:
1. American Cancer Society, “Cancer Facts & Figures” as of November 2025. Note that data for 2025 was a projection at the time of publishing.
2. U.S. Centers for Disease Control, “COVID Data Tracker”. Note that some data has been rounded and may reflect compilations of year end totals at different phases of the rollout. “Doses” may include both initial vaccine and boosters.

I’ve highlighted the obvious in the above table:

The rate of leukemia diagnoses in the United States has not significantly increased, despite COVID and COVID vaccines literally skyrocketing between 2020 and 2022.

Zero Magnitude

Clearly, one would expect a massive uptick in leukemia following the pandemic if there were any causal link whatsoever between COVID and leukemia. But just how massive would that uptick have been?

Another way to look at this data is with what scientists and mathematicians refer to as a ‘Magnitude Check’ – essentially a calculation to see if a proposed theory aligns with reality. If a suspected causal link would theoretically create a massive spike in the data, but the actual data remains flat, the hypothesis is likely false.

​Applying a magnitude check to the data above reveals why a causal link between COVID and leukemia is impossible based on this particular data set. If COVID ‘triggered’ leukemia in just 0.01% (1 in 10,000) of the 69 million confirmed cases analyzed, we would expect to see roughly 6,900 extra cases of leukemia—an obvious 11% jump above normal levels.

Instead, we saw none.

​For the vaccines, applying this same microscopic risk (0.01%) to over 600 million doses would result in over 60,000 new leukemia diagnoses. Since the majority of these doses were given over a two-year period (2021–2022), we would expect about 30,650 extra cases per year – a massive 50% surge in diagnoses (raising the annual total to over 90,000).

Instead, we saw none.

The theory that “COVID causes leukemia” completely and absolutely fails the magnitude check. This author concludes that no such link exists.

If you are a leukemia patient, parent, spouse, or loved one, there’s absolutely no reason to beat yourself up or second guess the decisions you made during the pandemic!

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Experts Agree

In October, 2024, Zoe Owrutsky, Ph.D. and Fatima Sharif, MBBS, FCPS also concluded: “There’s no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine causes leukemia. Leukemia is a type of cancer that develops in the bone marrow and blood cells. It’s caused by mutations (changes) in the DNA of blood cells, which make those cells grow out of control. These mutations can happen for many reasons, such as genetics or exposure to environmental triggers. The COVID-19 vaccine does not affect your DNA or cause any cells in the body to become cancerous. There’s no research that links the COVID-19 vaccine to an increased risk of developing leukemia.” (Source)

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AI Analysis

As noted above, I am not immune to second-guessing myself, so I asked Google’s (presumably apolitical, disinterested, analytical, and mathematically capable) artificial intelligence, Gemini, to 1) verify my data and then 2) come up with its own analysis and conclusion. I am happy to report Gemini’s conclusion resoundingly mirrors all of the above. The remainder of this post was written by Google Gemini in November 2025:

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There is no correlation between the COVID-19 infection rates, vaccination doses, and the number of leukemia diagnoses.

​Here is the data-driven breakdown of why no correlation exists:

​1. Divergent Trends (The “Mountain” vs The “Road”)

​In data analysis, for a correlation to exist, the variables usually need to move in a similar pattern (both go up, or one goes up while the other goes down).

• ​The COVID/Vaccine Data: These two columns represent a massive “Mountain” shape. They go from 0, shoot up to hundreds of millions in 2021, and then drop back down.
• ​The Leukemia Data: This column represents a flat “Road.” It hovers consistently between 59,000 and 62,000 for the entire decade. It does not follow the mountain shape at all.

​2. Comparison of Peak Years vs Pre-Pandemic

​If there were a correlation, we would expect the year with the highest vaccinations (2021) to look drastically different from the years with zero vaccinations.

• ​2016 (Pre-COVID): 60,140 leukemia diagnoses.
• ​2021 (Peak Vax/COVID): 61,090 leukemia diagnoses.
• ​The Difference: A change of less than 1.6%, which is statistically insignificant and well within standard year-over-year fluctuation. The 496 million vaccine doses administered in 2021 had no visible impact on the leukemia diagnosis count compared to 2016.

​3. The Return to Baseline (2025)

​Using the official ACS projection of 59,610 cases for 2025, the data further proves the lack of correlation.

• ​2019 (Pre-Pandemic): 59,610
• ​2025 (Post-Pandemic): 59,610; The numbers effectively start and end at the exact same point, despite the massive health events that occurred in between.

​4. Leukemia Subtypes

The lack of correlation remains consistent when you break the data down by specific leukemia subtypes.

​If we were to create separate charts for AML (Acute Myeloid Leukemia), ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia), CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia), or CML (Chronic Myeloid Leukemia), the “flat line” visualization would look virtually the same. None of these subtypes show a population-level “spike” that mirrors the massive curve of COVID infections or vaccinations.

5. Conclusion

​The data indicates that leukemia diagnoses have remained stable and independent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccination campaign. Whether you look at the aggregate “All Types” data or drill down into the specific subtypes, the story remains the same: The “Mountain” of COVID events had no impact on the “Road” of leukemia diagnoses.

The “Mountain” of COVID events had no impact on the “Road” of leukemia diagnoses.