Biden looks to channel JFK with a speech on ending cancer for good

President Joe Biden will channel John F. Kennedy next week when he speaks on his cancer moonshot initiative in Boston, pushing his administration’s efforts to halve the cancer death rate over the next 25 years.

Biden’s speech on Monday will take place on the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’ speech. The president will speak at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

In his remarks, Biden will be ‘laying out a vision for another American moonshot – a future where we end cancer as we know it,’ a White House official said.

The president also will ‘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 disease,’ the official said.

Biden’s speech will be on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Moonshot speech at Rice University. In that now famous speech, Kennedy said: ‘We choose to go to the moon. 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, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.’

The fight against cancer is deeply personal for the Biden family. The president’s son Beau died in 2015, at the age of 46, of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.

Biden has long pushed to end cancer – a call he has repeated throughout his time as president.

Last year, during a visit to a COVID vaccine manufacturing facility in Michigan, Biden said: ‘I want you to know that, once we beat COVID, we’re going to do everything we can to end cancer as we know it.’

As vice president, Biden launched the Cancer Moonshot during the Obama administration in 2016. It was an enterprise he carried over into his private life after he left the vice presidential mansion by launching the Biden Cancer Initiative. That initiative closed in 2019 after Biden announced he was running for president.

In 2016, when Biden announced he wasn’t seeking the Democratic nomination for president, he said he regretted it because ‘I would have wanted to have been the president who ended cancer, because it’s possible.’ 

Biden’s speech will be on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Moonshot speech at Rice University (above). In that now famous speech, Kennedy said: ‘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.’

After leaving office, Joe and Jill Biden then founded the Biden Cancer Initiative, a nonprofit organization supporting cancer research and prevention. 

President Biden relaunched the Cancer Moonshot initiative in February. 

Cancer is the nation’s second highest cause of death, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. 

In 2022, there will be an estimated 1.9 million new cancer cases diagnosed and 609,360 cancer deaths in the United States, estimates the American Cancer Society.