When former Vice President Joe Biden was seeking the Democratic nomination, he made a shocking statement: that if he were to become president of the United States, he would cure cancer.
"If I'm elected president, you're going to see the single most important thing that changes in America: we're going to cure cancer," he told a crowd in June of 2019 in Ottumwa, Iowa.
While the cause is noble and something that everyone can get behind, it turns out Biden wasn't serious about fulfilling his promise.In fact a new report from the New York Post shows The Biden Cancer Initiative, which was founded in 2017, donated no money to cancer research or grants. All of its funding was spent on staff salaries.
Out of the $4,809,619 in contributions the group received in 2017 and 2018, $3,070,301 was spent on salaries. In 2017, the charity dropped $56,738 on conferences and $59,356 on travel. In 2018, they dropped $742,953 on conferences and $97,149 on travel.
The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019), according to the charity’s most recent federal tax filings.
Simon, a former Pfizer executive and longtime health care lobbyist who headed up the White House’s cancer task force in the Obama administration, saw his salary nearly double from the $224,539 he made in fiscal 2017, tax filings show.
Danielle Carnival, former chief of staff for Obama’s cancer initiative, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, who took home $258,207 in 2018.
The charity remains active on paper but stopped doing anything once the former veep announced his plans to run for president.
It's kind of hard to find a cure for cancer when you're spending all your money on overhead and none on the actual cause behind the group.