“They. Covered. Up. His. Cancer,” tweeted the conservative provocateur Clay Travis on Monday, after Joe Biden’s office said that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
It’s easy enough to understand Travis’s logic. Is it really plausible that the former president could have discovered less than a year after his last physical in February 2024—with his doctors pronouncing him “fit for duty”—that his cancer had metastasized to his bones? As Dr. Steven Quay, a cancer doctor who runs Atossa Therapeutics in Seattle, told me: “The statistics are very clear. There is a 1-to-2 percent probability that you could have a normal prostate exam in 2024 and metastatic prostate cancer by May 2025.” The other 98 percent of the time, he added, “it takes at least five to seven years” for that to happen.
