, writing in his memoir scheduled to be released next week:

“And as I sit here today, do I wish I had been tested sooner? Yes, I do. Do I wish the cancer had been caught before it spread to my bones? Yes, I do,” Biden writes. “But I was treated no differently from any other eighty-two-year-old man in America. Maybe I should have been. But I wasn’t.”

Yes, that’s the point that some of us have been making since the first word of the diagnosis. You can read the assessment of the here. For the average man, the risk of a false positive diagnosis and the subsequent treatment is greater than the risk of not testing. But the average man is not the president of the United States! If it’s the health of the commander in chief, and you have a routine blood test that can detect a form of cancer, and the president is already undergoing blood tests, what is the upside to choosing to not run that test?

Biden and his doctors can insist they were following “standard procedure” by not running after he turned 72 until they’re blue in the face. But it’s not really up for debate that in light of the president’s serious stage four cancer — cancer that will keep Biden from doing the book tour he wanted to do — it was the wrong call. And it’s entirely reasonable to ask why Biden’s doctors — supposedly among the best doctors in the country — chose to not run that test.

In the book excerpt, Biden expresses frustration that some people believe he hid his cancer diagnosis. But considering the considerable gap between his staff’s description of his health — “I can’t even keep up with him!” — and his wife’s stated fear that he had a stroke on the debate stage, it is neither surprising nor wrong for Americans to doubt that Biden, his family, his staff, and his doctors were honest about his health during his presidency.