Former Vice President Joe Biden continues campaigning, but this time it’s for ending cancer, and his tearful speech at the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival in Austin, Texas, on Sunday brought people to their feet.
Biden began his work for The Cancer Initiative under the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force. The program has the goal of increasing research and improving access for treatment and detection and will benefit from nearly $2 billion in federal funding during the next several years.
“Billions and billions of dollars comes from taxpayers,” Biden told the SXSW crowd, Business Insider reported. “Your government, that many of you don’t like, is the vehicle of how this gets done.”
"I'm confident that the new admin ... will be as enthusiastic of ending cancer as we know it," he added. "I promise to do everything in my power to work with new organization to end cancer."
His one-hour speech included his vision for a time when people are provided with the right treatment and children can be vaccinated against certain types of cancers.
“Your generation can be the first generation on Earth that goes through life with cancer as a preventable or controllable disease as opposed to a death sentence,” he said, Variety reported.
Fighting tears, Biden talked about his son Beau who died of brain cancer at age 46 in 2015.
“I am unable to postpone for one day longer the things we can do now to extend people’s lives,” Biden said. “We can make enormous progress.”
Biden and his wife Jill received a standing ovation at the event. They oversee the Biden Foundation to continue working on issues dear to them after serving with President Barack Obama.
Biden chose not the run for the 2016 presidential run in 2015, but mentioned to Obama his one regret about not running is that “I would have liked to have been the president that presided over the end of cancer as we know it,” he said, BI reported.
Biden focused mostly on the initiative during his SXSW speech without getting into politics. “The only bipartisan thing left in America is the fight against cancer,” he told the audience, Business Insider said.
However, Biden did mention briefly his concern about current White House officials not believing in global warming while talking about harmful chemicals in the environment that could make people ill.
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