Declassified CIA Memo Shows Parasite–Cancer Link Studied Decades Ago

And just like that, the Horse Dewormer™ campaign makes a whole lot of sense.

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Working as a fashion writer in NYC in the ‘90s, I learned something that rocked my world: the hosiery industry was a lie. Call them tights, nylons, stockings, L’eggs, sheers, pantyhose, just-plain-hose, or—as one friend’s dad hilariously refers to ladies’ undergarments collectively—unmentionables, they all share the same fatal design flaw: they run. Some spring ghastly ladders the first time you wear them; others—and those’ll cost you more—can withstand a handful of outings before buckling under the pressure of a rogue fingernail. But sooner or later, they’re all headed for the landfill.

This, it turns out, is entirely by design.

“Of course we could make stockings that don’t run!” a publicist for one of the high-end brands told me, off the record. “But then I’d be out of a job.”

Thirty-plus years later, that business model seems to have made the leap from legwear to oncology. After all, a cure for cancer would be the pharmaceutical equivalent of run-proof stockings: life-changing for humanity, deadly for the industry.

For decades, we’ve been told that cancer is either a genetic accident or a metabolic curse—our own cells going haywire due to bad biology, poor lifestyle choices, or both. Yet for just as long, a small but stubborn group of maverick doctors has insisted that certain cancers behave more like parasites: organisms that hijack nutrients, evade immune defenses, and quietly drain their host. While the idea has mostly lived on the fringes of medicine, a recently unearthed 1950s intelligence document raises the awkward possibility that the doctors long dismissed as “quacks” may have been right… and that our benevolent, ever-trustworthy government knew it.