Biden's 2022 cancer 'slip-up' that was downplayed by White House resurfaces after ex-president's surprise diagnosis | 19 May 2025 | Former President [sic] Joe Biden's prostate cancer diagnosis has drawn renewed attention to his 2022 slip-up in which he claimed to have had cancer during a public speech. Biden’s alarming comments came during a speech about emissions from oil refineries near his childhood home in Claymont, Del., and which he appeared to blame for his cancer. “That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer and why for the longest time Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation,” Biden said during his 2022 remarks about global warming at Brayton Power Station in Somerset, Massachusetts. Biden’s use of the present tense "have" raised eyebrows at the time, but former White House spokesperson Andrew Bates referred The Post to Washington Post [so-called] fact-check honcho Glenn Kessler, who suggested it was a reference to "non-melanoma skin cancers."