President Obama is hoping to spend almost $1 billion through 2017 for his cancer “moonshot” initiative, which will be led by Vice President Joe Biden.
“The initiative aims to bring about a decade’s worth of advances in five years, making more therapies available to more patients, while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage,” a White House news release stated.
The only way to make progress is to focus on the issue, a senior administration official told reporters Monday. Biden will meet with researchers, doctors, philanthropic groups focused on cancer, hospital administrators, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and the like to figure out how the administration can move the effort along more quickly, just as President Kennedy’s call for landing a man on the moon within a decade helped focus that effort, the official said.
The U.S. has “to think big,” the official said. “It can’t be business as usual. Significant progress requires unprecedented levels of cooperation,” the official said. “That is why President Obama and Vice President Biden believe we need to think big and be aspirational.”
Obama and Biden are meeting Monday with administration officials serving on the White House Task Force on Cancer in Biden’s office.
The $1 billion initiative is intended “to jumpstart this work,” the White House news release stated.
“We are at an inflection point; and the science is ready for the concerted new effort this initiative will deliver,” the statement continued.
Obama isn’t waiting for next year’s budget. The National Institutes of Health is spending $195 million this year to focus “on high-risk, high-return research identified by the collaborative work and new ideas stimulated by the research community as part of this work.
Obama will seek another $755 million in the budget he will unveil Feb. 9 to continue the project.
More than 1.6 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed and cancer will kill an estimated 600,000 Americans in 2016, according to the White House.
“The kind of work the vice president is focused on is not likely, in the short term, to yield sexy announcements,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledged Monday. “But it is necessary to lay the groundwork for a cure.”
Earnest pointed to Kennedy’s moon landing objective as a realistic example of what Obama and Biden hope to achieve.
Kennedy laid out the goal and “oriented” the federal government toward achieving it, Earnest said. But it wasn’t realized until President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Kennedy’s push allowed it to happen “sooner than anybody thought,” Earnest said.
