President Trump said Monday that he was surprised that Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s cancer diagnosis was not made public a “long time ago,” seeming to suggest without evidence that the former president’s cancer was not newly discovered and had been covered up.
“There are things going on that the public wasn’t informed, and I think somebody is going to have to speak to his doctor,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
On Sunday, Mr. Biden’s office said he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Mr. Biden had spent May 9 at a Philadelphia hospital after a doctor discovered a small nodule on his prostate, his spokesman said last week. Mr. Biden, 82, had reported urinary symptoms before the nodule was found.
The cancer is Stage 4, with a Gleason score of 9, according to the former president’s office. A Gleason score is a measure of cancer aggressiveness, ranging from 6 to 10.
“To get to Stage 9, that’s a long time,” Mr. Trump said Monday, apparently mixing up the Gleason score with the cancer stage.
“You have to say, why did it take so long?” Mr. Trump said, adding, “It can take years to get to this level of danger. So it’s a — look, it’s a very, very sad situation, and I feel very badly about it, and I think people should try and find out what happened.”
Mr. Trump, who regularly blames Mr. Biden for nearly every challenge facing his administration, appeared to be trying to tie the cancer diagnosis to recent reporting that Mr. Biden’s aides concealed his mental and physical decline during his presidency.
“Why wasn’t the cognitive ability — why wasn’t that discussed?” Mr. Trump said. “I think the doctors said he’s just fine, and it’s turned out that’s not so. It’s very dangerous.”
A spokesman for Mr. Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many patients with prostate cancer are asymptomatic and most do not know they have something wrong in their prostate until a doctor finds the cancer, said Marc B. Garnick, an expert on urological cancer at Harvard Medical School. And although initial diagnoses of severe prostate cancer are somewhat less common than they used to be, they are not uncommon, he added.
“It still happens on a regular basis,” Dr. Garnick said.
Erica L. Green and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
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