The new chair of the President's Cancer Panel, within the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute, wants to rigorously study ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as potential cancer treatments, he told a Just the News-Real America's Voice special report that aired Wednesday night.

Yale University professor emeritus Harvey Risch, also a senior research scientist in epidemiology at its public health and medical schools, was an early proponent of the low-cost drugs for COVID-19 treatment and critic of the Biden administration's COVID work.

Ivermectin and HCQ are "among maybe a dozen various medications that should have more formal studies," Risch told the program in his first in-depth interview since the government formally announced President Trump had appointed him, cautioning that "they may turn out" not to help but further study is needed in case they do help.

"I've had a lot of anecdotal reports telling me that doctors have treated their patients with those medications" but "they never tell me really how many patients they treated" in which "it didn't work," he said. "So honestly, I don't know yet."

Risch emphasized caution and measured expectations throughout his interview but also that much of the good work in cancer research isn't showy.

"I don't want to overpromise, because everybody will get disappointed" if the panel doesn't meet self-imposed high expectations, "but cancer is a highly treatable disease" with 50 years of "great research" as well as underappreciated study in Risch's specialty of prevention, which "needs to be more visible," he said.

Cancer centers tend to carry the names of wealthy donors whose lives were saved by intervention, "but what you won't see is the three quarters of the population" that didn't get cancer due to preventative research, he said. If they all donated $10 "once to a cancer center, we would be really great [in funding] for cancer prevention."

He also challenged the pharmaceutical industry to work on "safe and low-cost" cancer prevention medications, which "they could patent and make money off of" in addition to after-the-fact treatments.

"It's a question of … being able to sort the fringe from the real" when it comes to evaluating emerging and alternative treatments, Risch said. The only way to vet the "whole industry of purported claims about medications and supplements," which should be approached "with a skeptical eye," is through "more formal evaluation."

Risch praised NCI researchers as "outstanding scientists" with whom he's worked most of his career, and wants to "enhance to the degree possible methods that we can use to inform the public about things that they can do to reduce their risks of getting cancer."

Tobacco smoking is still the most important preventable "lifestyle" factor in cancer, but research is getting better at identifying dietary factors, he said, citing a theory that the "inflammatory tendency of dietary constituents can lead to increased cancer risk."

He ranked "common oils" in cooking from "least to most inflammatory" on his social media pages this year, highlighting "some very good choices that people can use that don't cost essentially more than the common seed oils," both flavored and unflavored. 

Stomach cancers, which are relatively rare in the U.S. now, are closely associated with "the consumption of smoked and processed meats," for example, he said.