Two weeks ago, scientists at CAPRI, the Cancer Assessment and Prevention Research Institute, announced that they had developed a end-all, be-all cure for cancer, capable of selectively destroying any and all cancerous cells
permanently. Although the discovery was announced last week, the news only gained attention in the past few days through obscure web media outlets. Additionally, mainstream media networks spent the past two weeks reporting on a Donald Trump tweet in which he called CNN “a bunch of sad dumb doo-doo heads.”
“Is it selfish of me to think that it would have all been a little more glamorous?” mused Leo Aguado, one of the CAPRI researchers. “I mean, we discovered the cure to fucking cancer, I expected millions of flashing cameras as I stepped down the institute front steps, as Jesus took my hand to bring me up to my 72 virgins in Heaven. But there was literally no one at the press conference. Not even one of those cliche tumbleweeds.”
The complete absence of mainstream coverage of the discovery is credited to every significant media outlet using all available hands in responding to a tweet from Donald Trump roughly two hours before the announcement, in which he stated, “CNN is a bunch of sad dumb doo-doo heads. More like Cooties News Network! Biggest cooties you ever seen. Sad! #cootiesnewsnetwork #maga.”
The news cycle was subsequently filled with headlines centered around the tweet. MSNBC attacked Trump with an investigative piece titled “Why Trump is a Sadder Dumber Doo-Doo Head Times a Million,” while Fox News pushed back with the segment “Trump is Rubber and the Liberal Agenda is Glue.” CNN in particular ran a three-day breaking news segment titled “Trump and Cooties: We Know What He Is, but What are We?”
“The statistics don’t lie; Trump objectively has more gross cooties, like, to the infinitieth power,” reported CNN correspondent Vergil Paisan. “But how do we know? Well, the source is none other than Trump’s mother. Trump’s mother has so many cooties, you could design a turbine based on a cooties magnet and solve renewable energy forever.”
The CAPRI researchers remained puzzled about the media silence for much of the intervening two weeks. Lead researcher Ariana Libera reportedly began to doubt her own grasp on reality.
“I mean, this is basically our field’s fabled magic silver bullet. Everything we’ve known until now suggested that there couldn’t be a cure for every type of cancer with no chance of relapse, and yet we get this panacea out of nowhere,” explained Libera. “We had it peer-reviewed and replicated to hell and back. It deployed without a hitch. There is literally no cancer left in the world. This is the dream that every cancer researcher had as a naive 10-year-old. I started to think that it really was just a dream, so I asked one of the researchers to slap me and end it all already. I determined it wasn’t a dream when the pain didn’t match up to how much pain 10-year-old me felt from a 35-year-old doctor slapping my face.”
“You’d think this stuff should plaster news tickers in every airport TV ever, but no, all we get is some half-assed post on a backwater subreddit two weeks after the fact,” said Tara Corpio, the researcher who slapped Libera in the face. “At this rate, we should just paint our abstract orange and have it scream xenophobic rhetoric. Maybe we could get a mention on the 11 p.m. news with that.”
At press time, the research team was unavailable for comment, as they were chasing a passing news van yelling that they were available for comment.
Chris Jin is a fourth year at UCSD