President Joe Biden appeared to claim he has cancer while discussing climate change at a speech on Wednesday.
The president was speaking about what he intends to do about the climate and got on the topic of his upbringing, growing up in Delaware, and oil pollution.
“Five years ago, this towering power plant that once stood with cooling towers 500 feet high closed down,” Biden said. “The coal plant at Brayton Point was the largest of its kind in New England. 1,500 megawatts of power, enough to power one in five Massachusetts homes and businesses.”
Biden said that the plant had a bad “legacy” of “toxins, smog, greenhouse gas emissions,” which contributed to the “climate emergency.” Biden said that Gina McCarthy, a former regulator in Massachusetts, told him that people “used to get a rag out and wipe the gunk off of their car’s windshield in the morning just to be able to drive.”Biden said it was “not very much unlike where I grew up in a place called Claymont, Delaware, which has more oil refineries than Houston, Texas.”
“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 and rather than us be able to walk,” Biden said. “And guess what? The first frost, you know what was happening, you’d have 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 I why can’t for the longest time, Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation,” Biden continued.
“WH official tells me POTUS was referring to past removal of skin cancer in his remarks from Massachusetts,” tweeted Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich. “Biden mistakenly stated (present tense) that he has cancer.”
Many Conservative groups were quick to call out the comment. The RNC Research Twitter account posted the video saying, “Did Joe Biden just announce he has cancer? ‘That’s why I — and so damn many other people I grew up with — have cancer.’”
However, some were quick to defend the president’s comments. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler hit back at the tweet, saying, “How dumb is this tweet? Check out Biden’s medical report. Before he became president, he’d had non-melanoma skin cancers removed. Has no one at @RNCResearch ever had this common procedure?”
Kessler also attached part of a report from the White House on Biden’s health from last year, talking about how the president has dealt with skin cancer in the past, and any traces of the cancer are gone with no suspicious areas for observation.
But many, including Fox News Senior Political Analyst Brit Hume, pushed back in Kessler’s defense.
“The medical report you cited in your thread says he HAD skin cancers removed and has since had actinic keratoses frozen off since. Today, Biden say he HAS cancer,” Hume wrote.