When people have been at the pinnacle of power for eight years, figuring out what to do next can be difficult. That situation is not the case for Joe Biden, soon to be the former vice president. He has decided to spend the rest of his life waging a personal war on cancer, launching the Joe Biden Cancer Initiative. He is motivated by the fact that he is in the sad position of being a parent who outlived one of his children, thanks to the death of his son Beau from Brain Cancer.
Biden was already the moving force behind the so-called Cancer Moon Shot which deploys government resources to find cures and other treatments for the pernicious set of diseases that start in various parts of the body to take the lives of over half a million Americans a year. To be sure, thanks to new treatments and preventative measures, that number represents a decrease in recent years. But it is not yet zero.
The Joe Biden Cancer Initiative will work to improve data standards among researchers and work to ensure that more patients have access to the cutting edge treatments that are coming out of the laboratories.
The work will take up the rest of the soon to be former vice president’s life. Considering that Biden’s other path would have been a likely doomed run for the presidency, one might say that the world has gotten the better bargain.
Few if any people in America has not been touched by cancer. Some have seen a relative or loved one die from the disease. Many have had cancer, only to see it fall to remission thanks to treatments that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Immune therapies and nanotechnology are combining to kill cancers that hitherto would have been a death sentence.
If Biden helps to contribute to the day when a diagnosis of cancer will never be a death sentence, then that accomplishment will have overshadowed a lifetime of politics which for him has been less than spectacular. Would that more people of power could have both the motivation and the ability to do such good.