Biden Vows to Shut Down Another Deadly Disease Despite 455,000 COVID Deaths Since He Took Office
On Oct. 22, 2020, during the last presidential debate, Democratic candidate Joe Biden made a bold pledge regarding COVID-19: “I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country.”
In less than one year of Biden’s presidency, more Americans have died of COVID than under former President Donald Trump. As Newsweek noted, 351,754 people died of the virus in the United States in 2020, whereas, as of Dec. 19, 2021, almost 455,000 Americans had succumbed to the pandemic. As for not shutting down the country in the process, a string of disappointing jobs numbers is proof that last part wasn’t so true, either.
(Not that the media was all that focused on either of these numbers. Here at The Western Journal, we’ve been holding the Biden administration accountable for their failures on the COVID front, as well as the broken promise to get the country opened up. You can help us bring readers the truth by subscribing.)
Having done such a bang-up job controlling a temporal pandemic, the president is now promising to shut down another disease — one that’s been around quite a while longer and doesn’t respond to stay-at-home orders.
On Wednesday, Biden announced an initiative to half the death rate from cancer — something even the Associated Press was forced to acknowledge, with a megaton of understatement, was “a lofty but perhaps unrealistic goal.”
The initiative, called “Cancer Moonshot,” isn’t actually a new one; it was established by then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2016. It’s admittedly a personal battle for the president, who lost his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015.
One can appreciate this is a passion project and allow the president his loss, however, while acknowledging Wednesday’s “reignition of the Cancer Moonshot … to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years and improve the experience of people and their families living with and surviving cancer” — the phrasing used on the National Institutes of Health website — is a patently absurd goal.
The Cancer Moonshot will work to:
– Cut the cancer death rate by at least 50% over the next 25 years
– Turn more cancers from death sentences to chronic diseases people can live with
– Create a more supportive experience for patients and families— President Biden (@POTUS) February 2, 2022
“This can really be an American moment that proves to ourselves and, quite frankly, to the world that we can do really big things,” Biden said during his remarks at the White House on Wednesday, as per a transcript.
“You know, we’ve made enormous progress in the past 50 years since Congress passed the President — and President Nixon signed into law the National Cancer Act and declared war on cancer,” he continued.
“We discovered new medicines, therapies, early detection and prevention measures that extend lives and save lives. In the first 25 years since the National Cancer Act, the death rate from cancer was largely unchanged. Then things began to change. The progress over the last 25 years — the death rate has fallen by more than 25 percent.”
How are we going to double that number? Money, of course!
“So, my plea to you scientists is: Share data as best you can. My plea to my members in Congress is: Let’s fund this particular program and focus on it until we beat it,” Biden said.
This specifically takes the form of Biden’s proposed Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, described by the president as “a new kind of entity within the National Institute of Health — the NIH — with autonomy and authorities to drive unprecedented progress in biomedicine.”
The president also established a “Cancer Cabinet,” which will “drive a whole-of-government effort to unleash every possibility within our — within our power, within their jurisdictions.”
Biden outlines new actions he is taking in the fight against cancer, including the creation of a new “cancer cabinet” pic.twitter.com/q3w2CKiWiS
— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) February 2, 2022
This all sounds great, but there are two reasons why we should be insanely suspicious of this initiative.
Here’s reason number one, explained ably by Dan Bongino:
The guy who couldn’t “shut down” COVID now thinks he’s going to shut down cancerhttps://t.co/82jSeqBONV
— Bongino Report (@BonginoReport) February 2, 2022
Biden’s agenda as president can safely be reduced to wildly over-promising on things which require a) your vote and/or b) your money. And it’s not just on COVID, either. Think infrastructure, the American Rescue Plan, Build Back Better — and notice how Wednesday’s pitch sounded exactly like Biden’s pitches for those, too. We need to think big! Americans used to do big things — like the original moonshot, for instance — and we can do them again. All we need is tax dollars and your support.
One is almost shocked he didn’t bring China into this spiel. Can’t you see it? “Folks, we can’t let Beijing get new chemotherapies or treatments before we do. They’re betting against democracy, literally folks. I’m going all-in on it.”
How much of this has worked? Look at COVID. Or the runaway inflation begot, in part, by reckless government spending. Or the failure of the administration to get Americans back to work.
And that brings us to the second reason why this initiative shouldn’t be trusted: While the cause may be personal for the president, the timing is profoundly cynical.
December and January were ugly months for the Biden administration and congressional Democrats. Both major pieces of legislation they hoped to push through — Build Back Better and the federal voting overhaul — fell apart. Inflation and jobs numbers were appalling. Polling numbers for the president were catastrophic.
How to reboot and regroup? Get behind something it’s impossible to oppose. Coming out against beating sickness is a fool’s game, of course, which is part of why Biden is “reigniting” the “Cancer Moonshot” program with unrealistic expectations. And if you thought Biden was sanguine in his expectations during the speech, you should check out his tweet:
We can end cancer as we know it.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 2, 2022
With what? A “Cancer Cabinet” and funding for ARPA-H?
That’s a hard promise to buy, particularly when you look at what he told America on Oct. 22, 2020. Perhaps no president could have shut down the virus while getting the country open. Joe Biden assured us, however, that’s what he was going to do, if only we gave him our vote. Why should we trust him again when he says he’ll end a disease even more implacable than COVID-19?
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