The statement from Mr Biden’s office said he was diagnosed Friday after being seen “for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms.” When did his symptoms start? A spokesman told the press Tuesday that Mr Biden’s last known PSA blood test, which screens for prostate specific antigen, was in 2014. Why? Could another test have caught the cancer earlier?
One prominent oncologist, Obama Administration veteran Ezekiel Emanuel, offered an unsettling medical assessment on MSNBC. “He’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading,” Dr. Emanuel said. “It’s a little surprising. I looked back at the records, and there’s no evidence that when he got his health status, and the medical records were released, that he had a prostate specific antigen.”
That blood test isn’t perfect, and other doctors quoted in the press say they’ve had patients develop aggressive cancers like Mr Biden’s, despite clean PSA tests. Mr Biden was 78 when he was sworn in as President. The US Preventive Services Task Force currently recommends against PSA screening of patients 70 and older, saying that the potential harms outweigh the benefits for a population that already has a heightened risk of mortality from all causes.
The task force’s latest guidance, issued in 2018, says this: “Many men with prostate cancer never experience symptoms and, without screening, would never know they have the disease. In autopsy studies of men who died of other causes, more than 20 per cent of men aged 50 to 59 years and more than 33 per cent of men aged 70 to 79 years were found to have prostate cancer.”
Yet Mr Biden wasn’t your average 70-something. He was President of the United States, and he wanted voters to re-elect him for another four years. Had he remained in the race and won, the country would now be contemplating a President Kamala Harris without having had the election choice.
President Trump is 78, and he has received the PSA test as recently as last month, with the results disclosed by the White House. Did Mr Biden discuss the PSA and decline it? If so, were his physicians OK with that? “Fit for duty,” his doctor certified in February 2024.
There is a long record of Presidents who concealed their ailments, from Grover Cleveland’s secret cancer surgery, to Woodrow Wilson’s incapacity after his stroke, to John F. Kennedy’s Addison’s disease. Mr Biden’s White House hid the extent of his age-related decline until his June 27, 2024, debate performance made it obvious to voters. That’s bad enough, and it has raised suspicions. Though he’s no longer in office, the public-spirited thing for Mr Biden to do is to clarify the details of his disease history and PSA choices.
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President Biden’s announcement Sunday that he has stage 4 prostate cancer, which has spread to his bones, is a sad moment for the country, and we wish him and his family the best for treatment and prognosis. But Mr Biden owes the public more information, given that he left office only 120 days ago, after telling voters he was fit to stay through 2029 and age 86.