STEPHEN MOORE: Let’s Kill Cancer

There are few things in life more terrifying than a diagnosis of cancer – as any victim to this horrible disease will tell you.

So let’s kill cancer before it kills us.

What if we adopted an Operation Warp Speed for Cancer and made it a national commitment to treat and even eradicate this leading cause of early death in America?  This crusade could be similar in size and scope to our national commitment in the 1950s to developing a vaccine against polio and more recently the vaccine for Covid, both of which saved millions of lives.

We know this is not an impossible dream.  Over the past four decades, we’ve made stunning progress in cutting death rates from many forms of cancer in half.  But there is still a long way to go, especially in eliminating death from pancreatic cancer, lung cancer and childhood cancers.  More than 600,000 Americans die from cancer each.

There is an old saying that the first wealth is good health. Faced with a dreadful disease or shortened life span, the value of one’s material assets or consumption rapidly becomes second order in magnitude.  Most parents would give up nearly every material resource they have to prevent the death of a child.

The benefits to reducing pain and suffering and preventing the heart ache of losing a loved one to cancer are almost incalculable.

In a new study for Unleash Prosperity, Tomas Philipson and other economists at the University of Chicago, calculated the enormous monetary value in the U.S. from curing or drastically reducing mortality from cancer.

With new developments in cancer treatments such as gene therapies and prevention such as multi cancer blood tests, improved diets and physical activity, reducing obesity, allowing for more coordinated development of new drugs and vaccines, and particularly deregulating the approval process, the goal of a near cancer-free nation can potentially be achieved in the foreseeable future.

The study calculated the impact of eliminating cancer mortality entirely or by 80% in coming decades. This would eliminate some 30 million cancer deaths. That’s more American lives saved than American soldiers who died in World Wars one and two and every previous war over our 250 years as a nation.