President Joe Biden wants to reduce the cancer death rate in the U.S. by 50% over the next 25 years.
That’s a new goal for the “Cancer Moonshot” against the disease that was announced in 2016 when Biden was vice president.
The issue is deeply personal for Biden. He lost his eldest son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. The pain experienced by the president is shared by many Americans.
Without any guaranteed funding, the initiative comes some 50 years after President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act and declared war on the disease.
The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 1,918,030 new cancer cases and 609,360 cancer deaths this year. What the president 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.
The cancer death rate is currently 146 per 100,000 people, down from nearly 200 in 2000.
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The American Cancer Society said in a statement that it applauded Biden for “putting national focus on this critical issue” and that “it will be standing shoulder to shoulder” with the administration.
“The progress in cancer research is slow — some of the fruits of Nixon’s 1971 declaration were only harvested with the development of the COVID mRNA vaccine,” Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and former chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society told The Associated Press.
The research progress that has occurred has led to a “better understanding of the biology of cancer and will do even more for us in the future,” Brawley added.
Better public health practices, reducing cancer risks such as smoking, and informing people about the best cancer research could reduce deaths. Brawley said that one of his studies found that 130,000 people die annually from cancer because they do not benefit from known science.
Still, critics say even with the president’s best intentions of attracting public attention to the disease, achieving the 50% reduction is “extremely unlikely.”
“Similar past efforts like the ‘War on Cancer’ have made gains, but they have been more modest,” Dr. Barron Lerner, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University Langone Health, and the author of, “The Breast Cancer Wars,” told the AP.
“Cancer is many diseases and requires very complicated research,” Lerner noted. “Translating these advances to the clinical setting is never easy either.”
Biden was scheduled to give remarks Wednesday from the East Room of the White House, along with his wife, Jill, and Vice President Kamala Harris.
There were no plans to announce any new funding for the initiative. Instead, the administration will outline why it believes it can curb cancer through efforts such as increased screening and removing inequities in treatment.
The president will assemble a “Cancer Cabinet” that will include 18 federal departments, agencies, and offices, including leaders from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, and Agriculture, according to the White House.
The White House also will host a summit on the cancer initiative 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 $21 billion in 2019, including $16.22 billion in patient out-of-pocket costs.
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