Perhaps as little as a year after Biden’s doctors concluded there was no longer any need to test for signs of prostate cancer, he developed prostate cancer.
Former President Joe Biden’s office disclosed Tuesday that Biden last received a prostate-specific antigen test to screen for prostate cancer in 2014, when he was age 72. You may recall oncologist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel shocking the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday by declaring, “Oh, he’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading.”
In other words, perhaps as little as a year after Biden’s doctors concluded there was no longer any need to run PSA tests looking for signs of prostate cancer, he developed prostate cancer.
“It’s a complicated picture,” declared Politico’s Playbook newsletter this morning. Eh, it really isn’t. Biden stopped getting PSA tests at age 72. Yes, “Regular PSAs are not recommended for the average man in his 70s or 80s,” but the average man in his 70s or 80s is not the president of the United States. We, the general public, all just sort of assumed that any president would get the best care and best health surveillance possible, and particularly a president in his late 70s and early 80s. Remember, a PSA is a blood test, and the president’s health checkups already included drawing blood.
Note that Biden’s family history includes cancer in the other direction, in his son Beau’s death from brain cancer.
The new book from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin, President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, details how the Biden family conspired to cover up the severity of Beau Biden’s brain cancer, so that he wouldn’t have to step down from his position of Delaware’s attorney general:
Beau’s cancer treatment also demonstrated the Bidens’ capacity for denial and the lengths they would go to avoid transparency about health issues, even when the person in question is an elected official, in this case the sitting attorney general of Delaware.
In the summer of 2013, Beau collapsed during a family vacation and underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor. “Beau’s tumor was definitely gliobastoma. Stage IV,” Biden later wrote about the postoperative findings. “It was a death sentence,” Hunter wrote. Beau began limiting his public appearances that fall. He stopped doing extended media interviews. He appeared gaunt. He had a fresh surgical scar and a new haircut with it.
In September, Biden and Beau’s team internally debated how much to disclose about Beau – the vice president’s son and a state’s top law enforcement office – but ultimately said nothing. In November, Beau told a local reporter that he had been given a “clean bill of health.”
In February, Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung released a statement to The News Journal that echoed Beau. The attorney general, Yung wrote, had a “clean bill of health” after an exam.
The neurologist told the public that they had removed a “small lesion” from Beau’s brain. In fact, it was a “tumor slightly larger than a golf ball,” Biden later revealed.
Beau would remain the sitting attorney general of Delaware for the entirety of 2013, even as his family secretly flew him all over the country for a variety of experimental treatments. In April 2014, he started having difficulties with his speech. He would enter hospitals under an alias: George Lincoln.
Beau’s wife, Hallie, told people she didn’t understand why they had to keep his illness a secret. Making it public likely would have led people to rally around the family. He was an elected official. But both Biden and Beau opposed disclosure.
At times, Biden also instructed his team to mislead the media about his whereabouts. They would publicly say that the vice president was going to Delaware for the weekend, then returning to DC the next week. That was technically true, but Biden sometimes flew to Houston, where Beau was receiving treatment, to be with his eldest son over the weekend.
Beau Biden did not run for a third term as attorney general in 2014. On April 17, 2014, he announced his intention to run for governor of Delaware in 2016. He died May 30, 2015.
It’s just terrible that so many members of the public would suspect the Biden family of covering up and repeatedly lying to the public about a serious health issue of a member of their family in elected office . . . after it has already happened before.
Yesterday, Mark Halperin concluded, “As best I can tell, his PSA level was never released as part of the readouts of his exams. So I say once again, if if he was tested and they didn’t release the results, shame on them. If he wasn’t tested, then they should sue the White House physician for malpractice.”