US President Donald Trump promised to eradicate AIDS and that his administration would work to cure cancer if reelected in 2020, CBS news reported.
Trump was speaking in Orlando on Tuesday night at the Amway Center when he vowed “we will push onward with new medical frontiers.”
The campaign promise might be a response to a similar pledge by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden who spoke at a campaign event in Iowa and promised that if he is elected president “we’re going to cure cancer.”
The theme of the White House putting its weight behind a national effort to cure cancer had been explored in the fictional television show ‘The West Wing’ where a 2002 episode called ‘100,000 planes’ saw a fictional US President deliver such a promise in his State of the Union Address.
In the 2010 book ‘The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of cancer” Siddhartha Mukherjee explained that cancer had been known since ancient Egyptian times.
The American Cancer Society reported that in 2018 roughly 609,640 Americans died of cancer and over a million and half Americans were diagnosed with the disease.
Trump also vowed to eradicate Aids in the US “once and for all,” the once fatal disease can now be prevented using PrEP and those in the West who suffer from it can maintain a decent quality of life by taking various medications.
Trump proposed in his 2020 budget to expand PrEP access by investing $50 million and marking $291 million for the first phase of an initiative to reduce HIV infections in America.
Trump also vowed to land American astronauts on the surface of Mars.
Trumps administration also suggested to create a Space Force composed of 15,000 men and women as a sixth branch of the Air Force, CBS reported in March.
While Mars had been explored by human-made probes for the past 20 years no human yet landed on the planet’s surface. The possibility of human colonization of Mars had been explored in science fiction in such classic works as the 1950 book ‘The Martian Chronicles’ and the 2015 film ‘The Martian’.