Joe Biden uses anniversary of JFK 'moonshot' speech to lift off fighting-cancer metaphor

With a nod to a John Fitzgerald Kennedy speech about space travel, Joe Biden has drawn attention to his own "moonshot" to fight cancer.

The president has used his metaphor to push a federally backed study that seeks to validate using blood tests to screen against multiple cancers.

A recent Associated Press story by Zeke Miller and Carl K. Johnson indicates the Biden's endorsement could make the study "a potential game-changer in diagnostic testing to dramatically improve early detection of cancers." 

The Biden bully-pulpit push came at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston that marked the 60th anniversary of JFK's "moonshot" speech.  

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cancers are the second highest killer of Americans after heart disease. The American Cancer Society has estimated that 1.9 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed this year, with more than 600,000 deaths predicted.

Biden, the AP story says, "hopes to move the U.S. closer to the goal he set in February of cutting U.S. cancer fatalities by 50% over the next 25 years and to dramatically improve the lives of caregivers and those suffering from cancer."

Danielle Carnival, PhD

The article quotes Danielle Carnival, a PhD and the White House cancer moonshot coordinator, as saying that the best way to proceed "is to really test out the technologies we have today and see what works and what really has an impact on extending lives."

She cites as "one of the most promising technologies" the "development of blood tests that offer the promise of detecting multiple cancers in a single blood test."

Cancer, of course, has long been a Biden priority — stemming from the loss of his son, Beau, in 2015 to brain cancer. The president wrote in his memoir "Promise Me, Dad" that he chose not to run in 2016 primarily because of his son's death.

Scientists now understand, the AP piece notes, "that cancer is not a single disease but hundreds of diseases that respond differently to different treatments."   

Any effort to reduce the cancer death rate, the story continues, "will need to focus on the biggest cancer killer, which is lung cancer. Mostly attributable to smoking, lung cancer now causes more cancer deaths than any other cancer. Of the 1,670 daily cancer deaths in the United States, more than 350 are from lung cancer."

Dr. Roy Herbst, a lung specialist at Yale Cancer Center, thinks the current situation is "tragic." The moonshot, he observes, "is going to have to be a social fix as well as a scientific and medical fix. We're going to have to find a way that screening becomes easier, that it's fully covered, that we have more screening facilities."

Biden wants Americans who've delayed cancer screenings because of the pandemic to seek them out quickly, "reminding them that early detection can be key to avoiding adverse outcomes."

More information about the federal government funding research can be found in "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.

Opposition to veep's clarion cry is growing

N.Y. Times writer joins those who oppose Biden's use of 'cancer moonshot' metaphor

Margot Sanger-Katz

The bandwagon against Vice President Joseph Biden's call for a "cancer moonshot" is picking up speed — and riders.

The latest person to rap Biden's moonshot metaphor — contending that "decades of research have suggested…that the NASA space program is not a good comparison" — is Margot Sanger-Katz, regular columnist for The New York Times' online magazine, The Upshot. 

Biden's rallying cry, in hopes of finding a cure for the disease, followed the cancer death of his son, Beau.

Sanger-Katz's piece cites Barack Obama's reference to Biden's plan in January's State of the Union address, and notes that the president said he was "putting Joe in charge of Mission Control" so that we could "make America the country that cures cancer once and for all."

The proposed budget for the moonshot is just under $1 billion.

But Sanger-Katz points out the clarion call isn't new.

She reminds readers "you can see why the news media has latched onto the phrase. 'Moonshot' has echoes of President John F. Kennedy's stirring 1961 speech in which he called for a space program that could send a man to the moon and return him safely — a goal that was achieved only eight years later."

She also quotes President Richard M. Nixon as saying "the time has come in American when the same kind of concentrated effort that…took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease."

As well as George  W. Bush, who while running for president in 2000, called for a "medical moonshot" to cure the malady.

Sanger-Katz correctly advises, however, that "we now know that cancer is not one disease, but many, with complex causes and triggers, and that there will be no single cure for all of them."

She also suggests that $1 billion won't go far toward sufficiently bolstering any of the initiatives currently being placed "under the moonshot banner: vaccines for some cancers, combination drug therapies for others, immunotherapy treatments for still other types."

The budgeted amount, she writes, is "a small component of the nearly $4 trillion federal budget" and badly compares with the original moonshot's cost ("$160 billion in today's dollars"), the annual $5.2 billion budget of the National Cancer Institute, or the reported $1.4 billion cost of bringing a a single new drug to market.

Costs of cancer research, as well as a glimpse of politics in regard to that research, are covered in "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," the VitalityPress book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at caregivers.

Author raps failed War on Cancer, 'fad projects'

Researcher pooh-pooh's Biden's 'cancer moonshot' proposal, says it 'evokes sense of deja vu'

Vice President Joseph Biden's proposed "cancer moonshot" is unlikely to find a cure for the disease, according to at least one expert.

Vinay Prasad

In an op-ed piece written for The Washington Post, Vinay Prasad, a cancer researcher, author and assistant prof at Oregon Health and Science University, writes that the veep's plan "evokes a sense of deja vu" reminiscent of the 1970s and the ushering in of the War on Cancer — which, he says, "was largely unsuccessful at generating better treatments."

Last year was the original target data of that so-called "war."

It clearly passed without a victory.

Biden's proposal, which urged new funding and increased data-sharing, called for scientists to collaborate so they could overcome "cancer politics" and find a cure.

He 'd apparently suggested the moonshot after meeting with almost 200 oncologists, scientists and benefactors in the cancer community and finding an excess of "competition, territorialism and resistance to information-sharing."

He subsequently altered his goal to doubling the rate of progress, meaning that researchers would accomplish in five years what normally would take 10.

Prasad contends the major flaw in the proposal, introduced in January by Biden following the cancer death of his son, Beau, is that "thinking you will substantively improve cancer treatment by altering how it is regulated is like thinking you can run a faster mile by buying a new stopwatch."

The efficacy of cancer drugs, Prasad says, is beyond the Food and Drug Administration's control — and, regardless, "no matter what we do with the FDA, it can't produce better medicines."

The co-author of the 2015 book, "Finding Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives," also believes "if we are going to make real progress against cancer, we must acknowledge that…marginal gains — achieved a the price of substantial cost and toxicity — are just not good enough."

He ends his article with this:

"A commitment to funding science generally, and not just fad projects or treatment, in time of both budget surplus and shortfall, would be a true moonshot for the United Staes. Sadly, this is the one moonshot no one in politics seem to have the courage to fight for."

"Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a VitalityPress book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers, touches on how politicians have historically dealt with — and not dealt with — that disease.