Congress voted against funding a cure for cancer just to block a win for Biden
Congress voted against funding a cure for cancer just to block a win for Biden
The Moonshot program was the largest, organized effort by the U.S. government to find cancer cures. Congress voted it down.
Sounds philosophically consistent. What could be more pro-life, pro-business and pro-freedom than being in favour of endless cell growth unchecked by cell apoptosis? Come to think of it, not only does curing cancer sound like a socialist anti-prosperity regulatory agenda, killing off cells that would naturally grow is a little too close to abortion.
Curing Cancer is anti-Capitalist! Unlimited Growth Always and Forever!
And elitist!
They refuse to even let us abort cancer cells.
If you die you die.
The body has a way of shutting it down.
Cancer's cells, Cancer's choice
/s
Conservatives are generally opposed to any healthcare they personally do not need at the moment. They distrust science, education and medicine. Given a choice, most conservatives would dissolve all scientific research in the U.S.
Conservatism is a plague of idiocy, sickness and death. This has been true throughout all recorded history.
But think of the shareholders /s
We should keep a record of the nay votes so we can remind them should any of them be diagnosed with cancer.
I don't know how accurate this is, but I know that it fits with Repubs voting against the migrant bill that they had formerly wanted because it would help Trump on the campaign. Whether this is true or not doesn't change that they openly want to stall government, therefore this could be true.
I don’t know how accurate this is
Biden made a rather cavalier claim that he was going to fund investments in medical science that would lead to a final cure for all forms of cancer within the next decade. And I think we can safely say that's bullshit.
However, ramping up blue sky medical research and public sector spending on the adoption of new medical technology would be helpful in treating a host of cancerous maladies and potentially curing or inoculating against others.
Consider that the US isn't even on the front line of cancer research anymore. Cuba's cancer research has outpaced research in the states for over a decade. That, alone, should tell you what kind of progress is possible with a little strategic public investment.
Whether this is true or not doesn’t change that they openly want to stall government, therefore this could be true.
Conservatives hate public investment, particularly when it threatens private profits. Liberals do too, abet not as fervently (see: our bipartisan obsession with the health of the domestic automotive, financial, real estate, insurance, and commercial export agricultural industries).
But this is more an issue of scoring political points. Republicans were happy enough to finance Operation Warp Speed under Trump, in order to fast track the vaccine they thought they'd get to take credit for in 2020. And they loved nothing more than giant state sponsored give-aways to Majority Leader Bill Frist's family owned Hospital Corporation of America.
So they're not strictly against government spending. They simply don't want another Liberal Democrat like Kennedy taking credit for putting a man on the moon.
Fun fact! Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer -
yes, it works and has been independently verified. No, you can't have it because embargo.EDIT: vaccine here isn't actually what I thought. In this case it is a treatment to be used for certain kinds of lung cancer, not a preventative measure as we are used to thinking of Vaccine. Thanks to the comment below for going through it and pushing me to do proper research.
While my initial take was a glib link to a wikipedia page and not thoroughly researched, I do sill believe that the embargo has directly caused this treatment to come to market in the west as the levels of cooperation are non-existent. It has been used for 7 years in Cuba but is only now entering Stage 3 trials in the US.
Cuba have also became the first country to have 0 mother-child transmissions of HIV.
But the US has decided that working with Cuba to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (in the States alone) is less important than causing "economic dissatisfaction and hardship" to the Cuban people.
Slight correction on that vaccine, the FDA doesn't authorize any drug for sale in the US that hasn't passed it's rigorous trials and gone through its approval process. It's currently being tested and has more trials ongoing right now. FDA will be able to approve it for sale if it passes its trials.
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2023.41.16_suppl.9135
Also the word cancer vaccine kind of implies cure to some, but it's not by any means:
"MST was 10.83 months for vaccinated vs. 8.86 months for non-vaccinated. In the Phase III trial, the 5-year survival rate was 14.4% for vaccinated subjects vs. 7.9% for controls."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346887/
So it might be a useful tool but just don't want to get hopes up unnecessarily. People who's immune system reacted to the vaccine the strongest did best, so current trials are focused on combining it with an immune checkpoint inhibitor drug to increase the immune response even more hopefully (and those drugs are already being used by themselves in cancer). These drugs block "checkpoints" in the immune system that would normally stop it from attacking things like yourself, which we kind of want it to do in cancer.
Not saying I support an embargo in Cuba, I don't, just don't want this comment to be inadvertently read as "Cuba has had the cure to lung cancer this whole time and you're not allowed to have it!" which isn't true.
Thank for you adding some incredibly well summarized context.
Another clear example why both sides are NOT the same.
They aren't. But if one side could grow a pair instead of pretending that the other side is still willing to debate and act rationally like it's still the 90s, that would be great.
This is the downside to choosing politicians that are so wealthy and therefore disconnected that the entire USA could fall and they would barely notice. Example: Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan was practically "everything is totally fine here, no need for like, changes or anything".
Tbh, a cure for cancer is a little like finding a cure for all respiratory infections. You're talking about a pathology that encompasses hundreds of distinct diseases. Sure, maybe it is doable, but calling it a moonshot is a little generous; landing on the moon would be several orders of magnitude easier by comparison, imo.
Just so I'm clear, it's still shitty that they blocked this.
Read the article. It’s pretty clear that cancer is hundreds of different diseases and extremely unlikely to have a single silver bullet, but this description reads more like a coordination project
the program has made strides in expanding access to cancer detection screenings, especially to veterans, increased support for programs aimed at preventing cancer in the first place and provided funding to groundbreaking cancer cure research
Its goal is to cut cancer deaths in half by making diagnostics cheaper and more available, funding prevention, and funding research into treatments. No magical silver bullets here
Nope, Joe is very, very close to finishing the cure and just needs a little help from Congress to finalize it. But noooo, those dastardly Republicans don't want him to give us this cure. It's all their fault.
Oh, and remember to vote blue no matter who .
Look, man, it's an election year, the hype machine is going to be running full tilt, and every little thing is going to be blown way out of proportion, like that one time Obama killed a fly on national TV or that other time he wore a beige suit. I'm going to vote for Biden, not least of all because the other guy probably will end up putting me and my family on his "official action" list (thank you, SCOTUS). There's lots more reasons, but Trump openly represents the end of the US government as we've known it, and that's not hyperbole. He's been very open about his intent to dismantle any component that could possibly tell him no or hold him accountable in any way, which would functionally make him a king. It's far, far, far from an ideal choice, but it's an obvious one.
I was going to say "inb4 someone says that it's Biden's fault that congress did something" but I guess it's too late for that.
Why doesn't he just stick a lightbulb up the patient's ass?
Vote red because blue has blue hair.
Pro Life!
Cancer lives matter!
ALL cells matter!
You can blame Newt Gingrich for that one, he installed in the R's hyper partisanship and the idea that they can never let the D's get a "win". It carried them to a majority back in the 80's, and much like voodoo economics, they haven't changed the playbook since, since it still works.
To me it seems, a rich minority is gaming the system (political theatre, Fox news, CNN... --> public opinion), hoping to secure wealth and power against "the will of the people", up to a point where the system will eventually break and be replaced by dictatorship.
Ironically it is much more dangerous to be a billionaire in Russia or China than in the US or Europe.
Maybe that should be our message: it seems easier to exploit us without checks and balances, but having none can be very dangerous for you and your family.
However, the leader who will eventually emerge, the one using AI to check this comment, will be best for all of us, I'm sure!
Yes we all know that they fail at their jobs and fail to uphold anything that their office is supposed to stand for thereby failing the American people. Republicans are failures. That is an absolute fact.
Yay! Go Republicans! /s
You fucking idiots.
> claims to be pro-life
> isn't
GOP.jpg
I seriously hope they all get cancer themselves, just for the irony and to watch them claim they are still standing by their decision to die a gruesome death
As someone who works in oncology data science, this is fucking infuriating. But also, politically, it’s 100% expected.
Can someone call an adult?
Killing us all to own the libs.
Anyone got a link to the vote? Dont even know if its senate or house