BOSTON — President Joe Biden’s coming to town to push for his administration’s “moonshot” of halving cancer over the next 25 years.
Biden will deliver an address at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s historic speech at Rice University in Texas in which Kennedy proclaimed, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “will lay out that vision and provide an update on steps the Biden-Harris administration is taking to achieve this generation’s moonshot — not only to end cancer as we know it, but to change people’s lives, improving their health, and decreasing the burden of the disease.”
“UMass Boston will move to remote operations on Monday, September 12, to accommodate a visit by President Joe Biden,” the school posted on its website.
The school says that the heightened security of a presidential visit — which includes coordination between and the presence of federal, state and local police — that “will necessarily curtail access to certain parts of the peninsula and will disrupt essential campus operations.”
Likewise, the JFK Library will be closed to the public through all of Monday, the organization wrote in a notice, but will resume operations on Tuesday.
The “Cancer Moonshot” initiative was launched in 2016, when Biden was vice president, and “set forth three ambitious goals: to accelerate discovery in cancer, foster greater collaboration, and improve the sharing of data,” according to the National Cancer Institute.
In December of that year, Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which authorized $1.8 billion in funding for the “Cancer Moonshot” over seven years. Congress appropriated various sums over those years, from a low of $195 million over fiscal years 2020 and 2021 to a high of $400 million in fiscal year 2019.
In February, with the sun soon setting on that Act, Biden renewed the push for the Cancer Moonshot, aiming, as a White House fact sheet proclaims, “to end cancer as we know it.”
This isn’t the first presidential, or presidential-adjacent, visit in recent decades to the UMass Boston campus, the university’s spokesman, DeWayne Lehman pointed out to The Boston Herald on Friday.
In 2000, the university’s Clark Athletic Center hosted the first presidential debate between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
More recently, President Barack Obama on March 30, 2015, visited the site for the dedication of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute next to the JFK Library. Other national figures were there, including Biden and Arizona Sen. John McCain.
