Did the ‘cover-up’ over Biden’s mental decline also conceal the truth about how long he’s really been suffering from prostate cancer?

Joe Biden had blood in his spinal fluid and a leaking ‘balloon-shaped’ aneurysm below the base of his brain. His situation was so serious his wife Jill had been told not to enter his hospital room as the devout Catholic was read the Last Rites.

It was February 1988, and only a few months earlier, the then 45-year-old had dramatically pulled out of his first bid for the US presidency. Now he had been rushed to the operating theatre in Wilmington, Delaware, with agonising neck pain.

Thanks to the interventions of his doctors, Biden survived. It later emerged he’d kept quiet about the debilitating headaches he’d been suffering from for the past year, and which had reduced him to carrying around a large bottle of Tylenol [paracetamol] painkiller.

As Jill told him at the time, it was just as well he’d pulled out of the Democratic nomination battle against Michael Dukakis to fight George HW Bush.

Otherwise he might have been campaigning when his aneurysm started bleeding and he would likely have tried to push on regardless, with fatal consequences.

That may be so – but it’s also true that, had he been honest about his symptoms, doctors would have been alerted to his life-threatening condition sooner.

Almost 40 years on, Americans are now feverishly speculating whether the ex-president, his formidable wife Jill and his inner circle kept quiet about another life-threatening affliction – after it emerged that Biden, now 82, is suffering with prostate cancer that has spread to his bones.

Biden’s illness is rated 9 on the prostate cancer ‘Gleason scale’, which means it is extremely aggressive, and at stage 4 (there is no stage 5 with this cancer) in general medical terms.

Doctors say that though the cancer cannot be cured, it can be treated.

A statement issued by Biden’s office on Sunday claimed that he had been diagnosed just two days earlier after experiencing ‘urinary symptoms’, with medics finding a small ‘nodule’ on his prostate.

Yesterday, however, a string of medical experts lined up to express profound scepticism at this version of events.

They insist that the highly experienced doctors attending to a US president, who was subject to a rigorous annual health check, of such advanced years would never have missed such a serious cancer.

Several said they were convinced that Biden must have been ill with the disease – which typically takes longer to progress than other cancers – for years, and that he, his doctors and perhaps his closest family and aides therefore must have known about it.

Dr Zeke Emanuel, a senior oncologist who was a member of Biden’s Covid advisory board, said he was sure Biden ‘did not develop [prostate cancer] in the last, 100, 200 days’, adding: ‘He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021… I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that…

‘He’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading.’

New York urologist and prostate-cancer specialist Dr David Shusterman said patients with Biden’s advanced condition who came to see him typically ‘hadn’t had medical attention in ten years [and] presented to an emergency room with bone pain’.

He added: ‘The fact that we just find it at a Gleason 9 is pretty much unheard of in this day and age.’

Fellow cancer expert Dr Stephen Quay was also dubious of the Biden camp’s explanation, saying it would constitute medical ‘malpractice’ for Biden’s doctors to have failed to test a serving or former US president periodically for signs of prostate cancer (for example by monitoring so-called ‘PSA levels’ in his blood).

Dr Quay, a former faculty member of the Stanford University School of Medicine, added: ‘It is highly likely he was carrying a diagnosis of prostate cancer throughout his White House tenure and the American people were uninformed.’

Yale University Professor Howie Forman, a radiology and biomedical imaging expert who has worked in the US Senate on health policy, agreed: ‘It is inconceivable that this was not being followed before he left the presidency.’

Meanwhile, a 2022 video began recirculating on social media in which Biden had declared during a speech on the environment: ‘I – and so damn many other people I grew up with – have cancer.’

At the time, White House staff insisted he was referring to several non-melanoma skin cancers that had been removed before he took office. Yesterday, however, Republicans claimed that he had inadvertently admitted to suffering from a condition he was trying to keep secret.

There is, to be clear, no solid evidence that Biden’s cancer has been covered up. However, the debate seems set to continue. After all, Biden’s health and fitness for high office were long key concerns for voters, and have been sharply questioned in recent days.

A new book, Original Sin, has revealed the extent to which the Biden White House covered up and misled America about the dramatic mental decline of the oldest president in US history.

Published today, the book – which makes no mention of Biden’s prostate cancer – lays out in devastating detail how his administration sought to conceal and lie about the extent of his mental decline during his presidency.

It also makes clear that, as on his brush with death in 1988 and when Biden’s son Beau was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2013 before dying two years later, the Bidens have long sought to suppress news of their physical health issues.

The book, written by political journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, reveals that while Dr Kevin O’Connor, the president’s long-standing physician, repeatedly gave him a clean bill of health in public, he privately expressed grave concerns about the toll the presidency was taking on the ageing leader, urging aides to allow him to take more rest.

The book’s authors suggest Dr O’Connor was too close to his patient.

In particular, according to Original Sin, a code of omerta appears to have developed around Biden in the final months of his presidency, during which his closest aides and family, slavishly supported by America’s Left-leaning media, continued to insist in defiance of all evidence that he was fit to serve – while behind closed doors he was deteriorating fast.

At the weekend, audio was released for the first time of an interview Biden had given in 2023 to Robert Hur, the special counsel who was investigating his handling of certain classified documents. In it, the rambling ex-president failed to recall basic dates and details, at one point asking Hur: ‘Am I making any sense to you?’

Later, he asked: ‘When did I stop being vice president?’

Hur ultimately declined to recommend charges against Biden in part because, he said, a jury would find him to be a ‘sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’.

At the time, America’s Democrat-leaning media lambasted Hur for political ‘bias’ – but this was just one of many occasions, according to Original Sin, when Left-wing TV stations and newspapers cravenly collaborated with the Biden camp and ‘aggressively disputed’ that there was anything wrong with him.

In the end, of course, such machinations proved entirely counterproductive. It was only following his disastrous TV debate performance against Donald Trump in June 2024, during which Biden repeatedly lost his train of thought and babbled incoherently, that he finally announced he wouldn’t be running that November.

This left the Democrats stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris, who had just 107 days to campaign against her well-funded opponent.

Many Democrats have still not forgiven Biden – who has hardly helped matters by insisting in subsequent interviews that he could have beaten Trump had he stood against him and that claims of his mental decline were ‘wrong’. 

For his part, Trump struck a rare conciliatory note yesterday, saying he was ‘saddened’ to hear of his bitter ex-adversary’s illness – while the King, who is still undergoing treatment for his own undisclosed cancer, wrote privately to the ex-president expressing his support. 

However, Trump’s oldest son Donald Jr went on the attack, insisting the Biden family had covered up Joe’s cancer and scornfully asking how it was possible ‘Dr Jill’ (who has a PhD in education rather than a medical doctorate) didn’t know about it.

Authors Thompson and Tapper note that presidents throughout history have hidden their medical ailments from the public – from Franklin Roosevelt’s use of a wheelchair following about of polio in his 30s to Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s – but Biden’s suppression of his own cognitive condition, they argue, was ‘the most consequential’.

After Biden failed to recognise George Clooney at a glitzy Democrat fundraising party the actor was co-hosting with his fellow Oscar winner Julia Roberts 11 months ago, Clooney, according to the book’s authors, reportedly ‘felt a knot form in his stomach’.

Finally an aide told Biden who he was talking to and Biden limply replied: ‘Oh, yeah! Hi, George!’ The following month, Clooney publicly called on Biden to step down from the presidential campaign in an op-ed in the New York Times – and senior Biden aide Steve Ricchetti was furious. 

‘Internally, he threatened to shut Clooney down – some of his colleagues thought he sounded like a Mob boss,’ reports Original Sin.

Ricchetti is identified in the book as one of a clutch of top aides who refused to be honest with Biden about his chances of beating Trump, encouraging him to believe the delusion that he could win.

They found a powerful ally in Jill, who emerges in the book as a ferocious champion of her husband who ignored anyone who brought up his age or suggested he wasn’t up to running again.

She’d changed dramatically, note the authors, from the woman who made her opposition to Joe’s presidential bid only too clear in 2003, when Democrat grandees visited the Biden home.

The former part-time model, who’d been sitting by the swimming pool in a bikini, scrawled ‘NO’ in large letters across her stomach in a felt-tip pen and marched silently through the room where the men were meeting.

According to the new book, Jill more than anyone could see her husband’s terrible decline – and yet she was the most determined that he run for re-election.

Original Sin reveals how ‘Dr Biden’ (as she insists on being addressed) increased her power inside the White House by ensuring that senior aides she’d appointed, one of whom was known as her ‘Rasputin’, enforced loyalty to the Bidens with an iron rod.

On myriad occasions, top Democrat politicians, advisers and backers pleaded with the members of the Biden camp to persuade him not to run again, only to be spurned.

Even acclaimed director Steven Spielberg was brought in at one point, the book reveals, to improve Biden’s faltering image.

‘They worked on lighting, and a better microphone to amplify his voice when he would oddly speak in barely a whisper,’ says the book. 

‘The E.T. director would also coach the president before speeches like the State of the Union. [Allies] hoped that voters’ age concerns about Biden could be assuaged with a little Hollywood magic.’

According to the new book, Biden’s decline was never so obvious to the world as during the D-Day commemorations in Normandy last June when he appeared lost at times in photographs with other leaders.

‘One House Democrat was shocked,’ it reports. ‘Biden looked frailer and was shuffling more than many of the World War II veterans who were nearing 100 [years old].’

Biden’s cancer may have been missed by mistake, as some doctors claim.

However, the circumstances are undoubtedly odd – even without the medical experts weighing in with their own misgivings.

The questions about whether the Bidens kept silent on more than Joe’s mental decline are unlikely to go away.