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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Maya Yang and agencies

Biden commits to reducing cancer death rate by 50% over next 25 years

Joe Biden speaks in Boston, Massachusetts, about the cancer ‘moonshot’ initiative in October 2016.
Joe Biden speaks in Boston, Massachusetts, about the cancer ‘moonshot’ initiative in October 2016. Photograph: Elise Amendola/AP

Joe Biden has committed to reduce the cancer death rate by 50% – a new goal for the “moonshot” initiative against the deadly disease that was first announced in 2016 when he was vice-president.

The president has set a 25-year timeline for achieving that goal, part of a broader effort to eradicate cancers, according to senior administration officials who previewed Wednesday’s announcement on the condition of anonymity.

Biden delivered remarks on Wednesday from the East Room of the White House, along with his wife, Jill, and Vice-President Kamala Harris. Others who attended the speeches included members of Congress and the administration and about 100 members of the cancer community including patients, survivors, caregivers, families, advocacy groups and research organizations.

“We can end cancer as we know it. I committed to this fight when I was vice- president. It’s one of the reasons why, quite frankly, I ran for president. Let there be no doubt, now that I am president, this is a presidential White House priority,” Biden said on Wednesday.

“The [cancer] death rate has fallen by more than 25%, but … cancer is still the number two cause of death in America, second only to heart disease,” he added.

“In the last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, the pandemic has taken more than 800,000 American lives. But [in] that same period of time, cancer has claimed 1.2 million American lives.”

The issue is deeply personal for the president: he lost his eldest son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015.

“It’s not just patients, cancer changes everyone it touches … For Joe and I, it has stolen our joy, it left us broken in our grief, but through that pain, we found purpose, strengthening our fortitude for this fight to end cancer as we know it,” Jill Biden said, in reference to Beau’s battle with cancer.

The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 1,918,030 new cancer cases and 609,360 cancer deaths this year. What Biden is aiming to do is essentially save more than 300,000 lives annually from the disease, something the administration believes is possible because the age-adjusted death rate has already fallen by roughly 25% over the past two decades.

As part of the moonshot, Biden will assemble a “cancer cabinet” that includes 18 federal departments, agencies and offices, including leaders from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy and Agriculture.

Biden called on Congress to fund his newly proposed Arpah, or the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health, which will be a new entity within the National Institute of Health with “autonomy and authorities to drive unprecedented progress in biomedicine”.

He also called on the private sector to make drugs more affordable and further share data and knowledge to better inform the public and “benefit every company’s research”.

Moreover, Biden urged the public and healthcare officials to “get cancer screenings back on track and make sure they’re accessible”.

“Americans missed more than 9m cancer screenings in the last two years because of Covid-19,” the president said on Wednesday. “If you’re putting off screening because you’re afraid of what they’ll find, let me say this … I know cancer is scary. Going to the doctors can be scary but screening is how you catch it early before it’s too late.”

The White House will also host a cancer moonshot summit and continue a roundtable discussion series on the subject. The goal is to improve the quality of treatment and people’s lives, something with deep economic resonance as well. The National Cancer Institute reported in October that the economic burden of treatment was more than $21bn in 2019, including $16.22bn in patient out-of-pocket costs.

President Barack Obama announced the moonshot program during his final full year in office and secured $1.8bn over seven years to fund research to “accelerate our efforts to progress towards a cure”.

Obama designated Biden, then his vice-president, as “mission control”, a recognition of Biden’s grief as a parent and desire to do something about it. Biden wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad that he chose not to run for president in 2016 primarily because of Beau’s death.

When Biden announced he wasn’t seeking the Democratic nomination in 2016, he said he regretted not being president because “I would have wanted to have been the president who ended cancer, because it’s possible”.

The moonshot fell somewhat out of the public focus when Donald Trump became president, though Trump, a Republican, proposed $500m over 10 years for pediatric cancer research in his 2019 State of the Union address.

Biden continued the work as a private citizen by establishing the Biden Cancer Initiative to help organize resources to improve cancer care. When Biden did seek the presidency in 2020, he had tears in his eyes as he said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “Beau should be running for president, not me”.

Associated Press contributed to this report

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