President Biden making return to Massachusetts Monday on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s “moonshot speech”

State House News Service

Boston – President Joe Biden will lay out his vision for a “moonshot” effort to end cancer as we know it at the John F. Kennedy Library on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s “moonshot speech” on the U.S. space program.

Like most Americans, Biden has watched as cancer killed a loved one and as vice president he began an effort to marshal the resources and might of the federal government to turbocharge the search for a cure for the disease.

An average of 37,499 Massachusetts residents were diagnosed with a cancer each year from 2013 through 2017 and an average of 12,803 Bay Staters died of cancer each year in that span, according to the most recent state cancer incidence report. The goals of Biden’s cancer moonshot are to cut the cancer death rate in half over the next 25 years and to “improve the experience” of people living with cancer and their families, the White House said.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said that Biden’s speech in Boston “will lay out that vision and provide an update on steps the Biden-Harris administration is taking to achieve this generation’s moonshot — not only to end cancer as we know it, but to change people’s lives, improving their health, and decreasing the burden of the disease.”