Senator John McCain has discontinued cancer treatment, says family

John McCain, a leading Republican American senator and politician who has been battling brain cancer for more than a year, will not continue his treatment, his family announced on Friday.

“Last summer, Senator John McCain shared with Americans the news our family already knew: He had been diagnosed with an aggressive glioblastoma, and the prognosis was serious. In the year since, John has surpassed expectations for his survival. But the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict,” the family said in a statement.

“With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment.”

McCain, a war hero who represents Arizona in the Senate and ran for president in 2008, last attended office as a senator last year and has since been at home, undergoing treatment for glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer of the brain.

McCain has been an outspoken critic of Trump, and the president has punched back aggressively, as have his aides, sometimes in utter disregard of the senator’s failing health. A White House staff had, for instance, joked about ignoring McCain’s objection to the nomination of CIA director Gina Haspel, saying “he is dying anyway”.

He was the first US politician to call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, just a month after he was sworn-in in May 2014. He has remained a strong advocate of closer ties between the two countries.

From his ranch, where he received friends and allies, McCain continued to participate in major national debates and developments with his usual bluntness. On President Donald Trump’s Helsinki appearance with President Vladimir Putin, McCain said it was one of the “most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.”

There has been no White House response to the McCain family’s announcement.

First Published: Aug 25, 2018 07:27 IST