Posts misleadingly claim Biden said he 'ended cancer'

"BIDEN: 'We ended cancer as we know it,'" says a July 25, 2023 post from RNC Research on Twitter, which is rebranding as "X."

The post includes a short clip of Biden speaking during a July 25 White House event on expanding access to mental health care.

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Screenshot from Twitter taken July 26, 2023

Similar claims also circulated across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, spread by conservative US media outlets, commentators such as Fox News host Sean Hannity and politicians such as Congresswoman Lauren Boebert.

But the posts take Biden's comments out of context -- and conflict with the official White House transcript (archived here), which records him saying: "We can end cancer as we know it."

Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates told AFP in a July 26 email that the "official transcript is correct."

Biden's words are not perfectly clear in the short snippet circulating in some posts online. The president has a stutter and a history of making verbal gaffes, making him a frequent target of posts purporting to show him confused, sleeping or misreading social cues.

However, the transcript and full footage of the White House event (archived here) show that when Biden spoke of finding a cancer cure, he was not celebrating it among his accomplishments -- but rather listing it as one of his future policy goals.

"You know, in the last two State of the Union Addresses, I've laid out what I call the Unity Agenda. It is made up of four big things to -- that we're going to do together as a nation," Biden says.

"One of the things I'm always asked is: You know, why -- why Americans have sort of lost faith for a while on being -- being able to do big things. 'If you could do anything at all, Joe, what would you do?' I said, 'I'd cure cancer.' And they looked at me like, 'Why cancer?' Because no one thinks we can. That's why. And we can. We can end cancer as we know it."

He listed helping veterans, beating the opioid epidemic and tackling the mental health crisis as the other three "big things."

AFP has fact-checked other posts taking Biden's remarks out of context here, here and here.