WASHINGTON — The US president Joe Biden will reveal a plan on Wednesday that aims to minimize the death rate due to cancer by 50% for the next 25 years – renewing his long-made promise to “end cancer as we know it” five years back as a vice president.
“President @JoeBiden on Wednesday will announce plans to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years, part of an effort to revive an initiative to speed research and make more treatments available. #CancerMoonshot”, Tweeted The Jerusalem Post.
Apart from that, Joe Biden and his wife will also introduce a campaign to urge the US residents to go through screenings that were delayed due to the pandemic, revealed the US officials who disclosed the information on the anonymity condition. “Screening is important to reduce cancer deaths,” the source added.
Biden is a big supporter of cancer research and has been personally involved in its initiative. In 2015, his son, Beau, died due to glioblastoma (a severe type of brain cancer). The following year, Barack Obama, who was serving as the US president at that time called Joe Biden in his State of the Union address to superintend the cancer moonshot program, “with a goal of making ‘a decade’s worth of advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment’ in five years”.
Congress allotted $1.8 billion for the next seven years for the great initiative. However, roughly around $400 is still left to be allocated.
According to the National Cancer Institute, which leads the project, they have spent 1 billion already on 240 research projects. White House won’t be announcing any new financial aid on Tuesday, said, Senior officials.
Instead, the White House ceremony, which will welcome guests like Vice President Kamala Harris, caregivers, patients, researchers, and Congress members, will show the project leads presenting a clear-cut goals outline for the project.
The event has been organized by the White House as a fresh push to “‘reignite’ the moonshot program and ‘end cancer as we know it’”.
More specifically, Joe Biden will disclose the organization’s goal of cutting “age-adjusted death rate” – a statistic that accounts for expectations that older people are more likely to grow ill and die — by more than half over the next 25 years.” The founder of Friends of Cancer Research, Ellen Sigal, who works on cancer support research and bring new treatments to the patients briefed on the plan, said, “These are audacious goals, and I have no doubt there will be mechanisms to achieve them.”
Related Article: Future Authoring Program
