Cel Sci Corporation (CVM)

[Fosco1]

This study from Cotton is interesting, but not because it relates to black population as none of the clinical trial sites are in Africa.

It is interesting because basically it states that adjusted to socioeconomic and insurance status , survival in the white group and black group is more or less the same, while some minor differences (in stage occurrences, etc) can be observed.
This means that the large difference in OS that we see in SEER data between blacks and whites in the US is mainly due to socioeconomic / ability to pay for insurance reasons.

Other fact (Many links can be found on this topic) is that HPV related oscc has mainly developed in western countries, while is less spread in poorer countries or even countries like Italy :
hpv Italy
hpv Ghana

My personal conviction from all that I have read is that the real progresses in OS observed in North America is due mainly to the spread of the HPV related oscc in the white male population, while tobacco/alcool related oscc were occurrences were going down with healthier habits.

Therefore, the oscc observed in most of the sites of the study _ from which 62 out of 101 are in developing countries please see the list here :
List of dev. countries sites
_ are mostly not HPV related and mostly affecting a population which has low socioeconomic standards and poor ability to pay for insurances.
We have seen how disastrous survival was in Bulgaria : heavy smokers and drinkers, likely little HPV prevalence, less private insurances.

I do therefore believe that observed OS in the clinical trial treated by SOC only is far below the observed survival in North American statistics and closer from what Cel SCI states as an unchanged survival of near 50% OS @ Y5 in absolute numbers