Vice President JD Vance spoke about President Biden's cancer diagnosis on Monday and questioned whether the former president was "capable of doing the job" while he was still in office.
"We wish the best for the former president's health," Vance said aboard Air Force Two. "You can separate the desire for him to have the right health outcome with the recognition that whether it was doctors or whether there were staffers around the former president, I don't think he was able to do a good job for the American people, and that's not politics. That's not because I disagreed with him on policy. That's because I don't think that he was in good enough health."
On Sunday, Biden revealed he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had metastasized to the bone. His office called it a "more aggressive form of the disease" but said the cancer "appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management." Biden's office said his diagnosis had a Gleason score of 9.
In a post on X on Monday, Biden shared a picture of himself with former First Lady Jill Biden.
"Cancer touches us all," Biden wrote. "Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support."
RELATED STORY | Biden's prostate cancer diagnosis sparks support and political scrutiny
In a social media post on Sunday, President Trump wrote that he and First Lady Melania Trump were wishing Biden a "successful recovery."
On Monday, Vance combined his well wishes with questions.
"In some ways, I blame him less than I blame the people around him," Vance said of Biden. "Why didn't the American people have a better sense of his health picture? Why didn't the American people have more accurate information about what he was actually dealing with? This serious stuff. This is the guy who carries around the nuclear football for the world's largest nuclear arsenal. This is not child's play, and we can pray for good health but also recognize that if you're not in good enough health to do the job, you shouldn't be doing the job."
It's "not impossible, but not common" that a patient with this stage of cancer would have had it go undetected until this point, according to Dr. Daniel P. Petrylak, a medical oncologist and Chief of Genitourinary Oncology at Yale Medical Center.
"I've seen patients who have had low PSA values, high Gleason scores," Petrylak said. So, it is possible that this has occurred. I would have hoped that he was monitored medically, that this could have been picked up earlier."
Petrylak said without Biden's medical records it would be speculative to comment on whether Biden's cancer could have been detected earlier.
