According to federal filings, a cancer charity started by former Vice President Joe Biden gave out no money to cancer research and instead gave millions of dollars to staff salaries.
Founded in 2017, the Biden Cancer Initiative was founded by Joe and Jill Biden to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes.” According to the filings however, no money was even spent on research.
Check out what the New York Post reported:
The charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019), according to the charity’s most recent federal tax filings.
Simon, a former Pfizer executive and longtime health care lobbyist who headed up the White House’s cancer task force in the Obama administration, saw his salary nearly double from the $224,539 he made in fiscal 2017, tax filings show.
Danielle Carnival, former chief of staff for Obama’s cancer initiative, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, who took home $258,207 in 2018.
The charity spent $56,738 on conferences and $59,356 on travel that year. The following year, the travel expenditure swelled to $97,149, and the non-profit spent $742,953 on conferences, tax filings show.
But under grants distributed, it listed zero.
According to Simon, the point of the charity was to find treatment for all people no matter what their racial or economic background was.
A 2017 press statement details how the Biden Cancer Initiative was started shortly after Joe Biden’s son Beau Biden died of a brain tumor. Thre initiative was creative to give “urgent” solutions to treating cancer.
The New York Post continues:
The Bidens stacked the board with leading oncologists and celebrity cancer survivors, including musician Jimmy Gomez from the Black Eyed Peas.
After only two years, the charity “paused” its operations when Biden and his wife stepped down for Joe Biden’s presidential run.
Although the organization is still officially active, according to the IRS, Simon said in a 2019 interview that without the Bidens at the helm, the charity lost its edge.
“We tried to power through but it became increasingly difficult to get the traction we needed to complete our mission,” he told the AP in July 2019.
Neither Simon nor Biden could be reached for comment last week.