Biden Touts 'Biden Cancer Initiative,' Which Closed After Spending on Salaries, Nothing on Research

President Joe Biden touted his past support for an organization called the Biden Cancer Initiative on Wednesday, as he announced a “Moonshot” on cancer research — but ignored its scandal-plagued history, which arose in the 2020 campaign.

As the New York Post reported in 2020, the organization — which Biden opened after leaving office in 2017, but closed just two yeas later — spent no money on cancer research, but spent millions of dollars of donors’ money on staff salaries.

The Washington Free Beacon had reported earlier in 2020 that the Biden Cancer Initiative spent 65 percent of its total budget of nearly $5 million on staff compensation between 2017 and 2018. It spent nothing whatsoever on cancer research.

Moreover, as Breitbart News noted, Biden’s appearance at a conference in 2017 to promote the Biden Cancer Initiative served as a pretext for a meeting with businessman Tony Bobulinski, who was to set up a joint venture with a Chinese firm.

Bobulinski later confirmed reports, based on materials on the laptop of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, that he had met with the former Vice President, who wanted to be given 10% of the equity in the company, which was to have been called Sinohawk.

Biden lost his other son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015 — a loss that, Biden says, motivates his interest in curing the disease.

In presenting his “Moonshot” initiative, Biden castigated doctors, hospitals, and researchers on Wednesday for allegedly refusing to share their knowledge about cancer treatments, promising that his new initiative would break down the “silos” between different research institutions.

He also claimed that all cancer patients wanted to share their private medical data, despite legal protections and other practices that made the sharing of patients’ personal information more difficult.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new novel, Joubert Park, tells the story of a Jewish family in South Africa at the dawn of the apartheid era. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, recounts the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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