President Joe Biden, for whom this subject has a painful personal dimension, said on Monday, 12 September, his dream to “cure cancer once and for all,” precisely sixty years after a historic speech by John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the conquest of the Moon.
“In America, we believe that anything is possible,” he said in a speech at the bookstore dedicated to the slain president in Boston (Northeast), after an introduction by the latter’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy.
In his Kennedism speech, like the one delivered by “JFK” sixty years ago to the day, in which he promised to send a man to the moon, Joe Biden said he wanted to “organize and measure the best of our energy and talents to end cancer as we know it and even to cure cancer once and for all.” “Cancer (…) doesn’t care if you are a Republican or a Democrat. Beating cancer is something we can do together,” he hammered.
When JFK promised the conquest of the Moon, John Fizgerald Kennedy had “created a national goal, capable of bringing the American people together, and a common cause. And it succeeded”, recalled the American president, who wanted to reduce the mortality related to the cancer of 50% in 25 years. It is a question, he said, of “making sure that more and more, cancer is not a death sentence but a chronic disease that people can live with.”
There are several reasons for the White House’s attitude. For example, it has as much to do with the sometimes exorbitant cost of treatment as it does with the detection and treatment of cancers, with the exploration of blood tests and new therapies.
“When they get their diagnosis, many people first think about +How will I pay for the care? Do I have to sell the house? Stop making car payments? Will we be able to pay for the kids’ education?” the American president said.
The president’s family has limited the amount that many American citizens, beneficiaries of the Medicare program, the American health insurance system to which people over 65 years old have access, to 2,000 USD per year. But, she points out that some patients still pay thousands of dollars annually to treat prostate or breast cancer.
Another primary focus of the U.S. government is screening and developing new treatments. The U.S. has launched a large-scale test – initially involving 24,000 people, to expand it to 225,000 – to identify difficulties that would be able to detect one or more cancers from a blood test alone.
The American president also spoke of the possibility of developing vaccines and finding less burdensome treatments: “Imagine, instead of harsh chemotherapy, a simple blood test, or a pill bought at the local pharmacy instead of invasive therapies and extended hospital stays.
President Kennedy proclaimed, on September 12, 1962: “We choose to go to the Moon” by fixing the objective to make men walk there before the end of the decade. The aim has been met since, on July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon.
The fight against cancer is a political objective and an intimate fight for the American president, whose eldest son, Beau Biden, was taken by brain cancer in 2015 at 46.
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