President Joe Biden recently announced, with great fanfare, his “cancer moonshot” initiative. Biden used soaring and promising rhetoric about, at last, finding a cure for one of the world’s leading killers.

Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on Sept. 12, the president declared: “Beating cancer is something we can do together, and that’s why I’m here today.” For perhaps the first time in his presidency, Biden seemed to cross the aisle and reach out for Republican support by saying: “Cancer doesn’t discriminate between red or blue; it doesn’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”