In context: Joe Biden’s 2022 cancer remarks resurface with 2025 prostate cancer diagnosis

On May 18, former President Joe Biden’s staff announced he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer. In response, several social media users began circulating a three-year-old video clip of Biden as evidence that he knew about his diagnosis years before. 

"WOW: Joe Biden said literally over TWO YEARS AGO that he had cancer. The Biden regime at the time called it a ‘gaffe.’ Have they been covering this up for YEARS?" one user posted May 18 on X. 

Other prominent conservative commentators including Donald Trump Jr. shared similar posts about the 2022 speech and a cover-up. Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis overlaps with the release of the book "Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, about how Biden’s inner circle worked to conceal signs of decline.

The viral clip comes from July 20, 2022, remarks Biden delivered in Somerset, Massachusetts, about climate change and clean energy. But, according to a White House spokesperson at the time, Biden’s comments referenced the removal before his presidency of several non-melanoma skin cancers, disclosed in the president’s 2021 health report summary. We found no evidence that Biden’s spokesperson or others from the White House called the comments a "gaffe." 

Here are Biden’s 2022 remarks in context: 

"Gina McCarthy, a former regulator in Massachusetts, was telling me on the way up how folks used to get a rag out and wipe the gunk off of their car’s windshields in the morning just to be able to drive.

"Not very much unlike where I grew up, in a place called Claymont, Delaware, which has more oil refineries than Houston, Texas, had in its region, just across the line in Pennsylvania, and all the prevailing winds are our way. 

"I just lived up the road in an apartment complex when we moved to Delaware. And just up the road a little school I went to, Holy Rosary grade school, and because it was a four lane highway that was accessible, my mother drove us, rather than us to be able to walk. 

"And guess what? The first frost you knew what was happening. You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window. That's why I, and so damn many other people I grew up with, have cancer and why for the longest time Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation. But that's the past, and we're going to build a different future, one with clean energy, good paying jobs."

Following his 2022 remarks, social media users questioned whether Biden had just dropped a health bombshell during a routine speech. The Republican National Committee X account posted on July 20, 2022, "Did Joe Biden just announce he has cancer?"

In 2021, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the physician to the president and Biden’s long-time primary care doctor, had reported in his health summary that Biden had "several localized, non-melanoma skin cancers removed" before the start of his presidency. "These lesions were completely excised, with clear margins." 

Andrew Bates, then-deputy White House press secretary, posted on July 20, 2022, on X that the non-melanoma skin cancers were "what the President was referring to."

Biden’s May 18 announcement about prostate cancer referred to a recent diagnosis after doctors found a small nodule on his prostate.

Biden’s prostate cancer was categorized as having a Gleason score of 9 out of 10, which grades the severity of prostate cancer based on the abnormality of cancer cells under a microscope.  A Gleason score of 9 or 10 "is the worst form of prostate cancer you can have," said Dr. Benjamin J. Davies, chief of urology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Shadyside. 

With Gleason scores of 9 or 10, "it’s not really a disease that is screenable in most instances," because of how aggressive it is and how fast it can develop, Davies said. 

"The scenario the president's going through is quite familiar to us in the business," said Davies. "You can be screened for it and it still can happen to you. This doesn't seem anything nefarious to me at all. This just looks like regular, 82-year-old metastatic prostate cancer."

When asked about Biden’s diagnosis at a May 19 press conference, President Donald Trump said it was "sad" but asked why "the public wasn’t notified a long time ago, cause to get to stage 9, that’s a long time."

But a Gleason score is different from other cancer staging and does not necessarily indicate how long the cancer has been developing. It’s a measure of the aggressiveness of the cancer cells. 

Lorelei Mucci, an American Cancer Society senior scientific adviser, said there are windows of time when all types of cancer might be present and growing without producing symptoms and escaping clinical detection. That window could be seven to 10 years or even longer for prostate cancer, she said.

"In addition, some aggressive prostate tumors do not express a lot of the blood levels of prostate specific antigen for some reason," Mucci said. That means even if Biden were regularly screened for prostate cancer, the prostate specific antigen levels "may have been low and the cancer not producing any symptoms."

And Biden might not have undergone regular prostate cancer screening during his presidency. Expert groups including the American Urological Association and the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force do not recommend routine prostate screenings for men over 70. 

"It's actually good medicine not to screen people in their 80s," said Davies. Most of the cancers you find in that age group are the kind that do not require treatment.