Joe Biden’s cancer has spread to his bones and further and is causing significant pain and debilitating symptoms, his son Hunter Biden said in an August interview.
His words landed days Jill Biden’s own admission. The former first lady put it plainly: her husband will “forever live with cancer.”
Two days later, Hunter Biden offered his own account, in an interview broadcast August 7 on BBC Newsnight. Asked by host Paddy O’Connell how the family has taken the diagnosis, he didn’t dress it up.
“It’s really tough,” he said. “The cancer has spread, is metastasized into his bones and further. It’s very painful… and it’s very debilitating in many respects.”
What struck him most was his father’s silence about it. “The only thing that I say about my dad about his health right now is I wish he would complain more because it’s not good.”
Yet for all that, hunter noted, his father hasn’t slowed down. “He’s still out there. He’s still doing this thing that he so believes in this country, and as long as he’s alive I’m promise you he’s going to continue to fight.”
He called Biden “the center of our family” and added that joe remains closely engaged with his children and grandchildren, “in a way that is hard for me to even possibly articulate.”
Jill Biden went on Kelly Ripa’s podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera, on August 5 and gave the closest thing to a straight answer the family has offered. Joe is “doing OK,” she said. But OK isn’t the same as cured.
“Unfortunately for Joe, it metastasized to his bones, which means that he will forever live with cancer,” she said. No hedging. No softening it for the cameras.
Jill Biden said the cancer had already spread by the time it was discovered, making Joe’s case different from prostate cancer detected early enough to be treated successfully.
She further described the reality of living with the disease as constant, daily and challenging, drawing on her family’s experience with cancer, including the loss of their son Beau.
The diagnosis itself dates back to May 2025, when Biden’s personal office confirmed an aggressive form of prostate cancer, a Gleason score of 9, that had already reached the bone by the time it was announced.
The statement offered one note of hope: the disease appeared hormone-sensitive, treatable with hormone therapy and radiation.
Jill Biden also gave her account of how the diagnosis surfaced. The first sign, she said, was mundane: Biden was getting up seven times a night to use the bathroom.
She’d flagged it to White House physicians while he was still in office, she said, and believed the matter had been handled. It hadn’t. After the couple left the White House in January 2025 and the symptom persisted, she told him plainly, “something’s wrong,” and pushed him toward a specialist.
The result, she said, caught her off guard. Prostate cancer wasn’t what she expected.
Kelly Ripa also responded, in the same interview, to claims that the diagnosis had been concealed while Biden was still president.
Kelly Ripa said her own father had been diagnosed with “the exact same” condition roughly six months before Biden’s diagnosis became public, which she cited in pushing back on the idea that the timing reflected a cover-up.
Jill Biden said the family continues to monitor Biden’s condition through testing and medication every three months.
In the same appearance, Jill Biden also promoted her memoir, View From the East Wing — a reminder that even this conversation was, in part, a book tour.
