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As a crowd of 20,000 looked on, laughing, Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday mocked his father’s emerging rival Joe Biden for the ambitious pledge he made recently to “cure cancer” if elected president. “I’m going to cure cancer,” Trump Jr. said contemptuously, throwing his arms above his head. “Wow! Why the hell didn’t you do that over the last 50 years, Joe?” Once President Trump took the stage at his campaign kickoff rally in Orlando, he made his own pledge: He, too, would cure cancer once and for all. (Facher and Joseph, 6/19)

Joe Biden was on friendly turf when he appeared in January 2018 at a San Francisco health care conference to call for urgency in the search for a cancer cure. He had come before an invitation-only crowd of 2,000 health care industry leaders and investors to tout the work of his Biden Cancer Initiative, the nonprofit that has been his defining venture since leaving the Obama White House more than two years ago. (Braun, 6/19)

What does it mean to be poor? Biden took an expansive view at a presidential candidate forum hosted by anti-poverty advocates. The Census Bureau calculates the poverty rate in different ways. Using the official poverty measure, 12.3 percent of U.S. residents were below the federal poverty line in 2017. Using the supplemental poverty measure, the rate was 13.9 percent. Biden says it’s much more: almost half the country. We surveyed several leading researchers on poverty, and almost all agreed Biden was including people who are not poor. (Rizzo, 6/20)

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) released a plan Thursday that would seek to slow the spread of HIV by making a preventive drug more accessible. What’s the reason for the plan? Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) has been found to reduce the risk of contracting HIV by up to 92 percent for those who take it on a daily basis. But the drug cost more than $20,000 a year in 2018, according to Harris' office. (Levine, 6/20)