Dr. Zeke Emanuel: ‘It’s Little Strange,’ Biden Either Did Not Have the Test or the Test Results Were Not Disclosed to the Public

BRZEZINSKI: “Zeke, are we operating on — just listening to you and Joe here, trying to figure out what to deduce here, but are we operating on the assumption that President Joe Biden had prostate cancer for at least several years and either did not test for it and then discovered it just now? Is that possible? And —“
EMANUEL: “Yeah.”
BRZEZINSKI: “— would a doctor, a White House doctor and the team, would they agree not to test for that?”
EMANUEL: “Again, if you’re a doctor respecting medical ethics, you talk about it with the patient. Do they want this test or not? You talk about the pros and cons. You talk about what the recommendations are of various organizations, including the American Neurological Association —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Yes.”
EMANEL: “— the American Cancer Society. So the ultimate decision is President Biden’s. I would say that it is surprising he did not get this test, given the fact that the proclivity of presidential physicians is test more rather than less. And I think it is a little — it’s a little strange. We do know from the population, like I said, 7 percent of people —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.”
EMANUEL: “— diagnosed with prostate cancer get it diagnosed at the metastatic —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Right.”
EMANUEL: “— moment when it’s already metastatic. So it’s not unusual that people can say, no, I don’t want the test or their doctor doesn’t recommend it or they don’t get the test for one reason or another.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Grasping at every option here is that possibly he had the test. Can this test miss it?”
EMANUEL: “Given the fact — the answer is, of course, but given the fact that he has an annual exam, test is unlikely to miss it, given the fact that it’s a Gleason nine, which means it’s pretty wild looking in the sense of underneath. It doesn’t look like a normal prostate cancer, a prostate cell. It looks like a prostate cancer cell, which is — looks more, you know, atypical. It’s — it’s not likely that his prostate specific antigen, his PSA, which is the test we’re talking about, would have been in the normal range. It would have been elevated above four. And that is a — that does say you should do something about it. Now you might test it again a few months later and see if the number has gone up or gone down, that you got an aberrant reading for one reason or another, but I don’t — that doesn’t seem likely in this situation. Either they didn’t test for it or they test for it, they didn’t report it. And we didn’t get the information as a public.”