Enlarge / US President Donald Trump arrives for a "Keep America Great" campaign rally at Huntington Center in Toledo, Ohio, on January 9, 2020. (credit: Getty | Saul Loeb )

The CEO of the American Cancer Society has refuted President Trump’s claim that his administration had a hand in lowering the country’s cancer mortality rate, which has been steadily declining since 1991—26 years prior to Trump taking office.

Trump’s bold claim came after the American Cancer Society published its latest data on US cancer mortality rates in an annual report. The data, published Wednesday, January 8, indicated that the overall cancer mortality rate continued its downward slide through 2017, with a 2.2 percent drop between 2016 and 2017. That’s the largest single-year drop in cancer mortality rate ever recorded. And, overall, mortality rates between 1991 and 2017 have declined by 29 percent, sparing an estimated 2.9 million deaths from cancer in that time frame.

The next day, January 9, Trump posted a tweet appearing to take credit for the decline, writing: “U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good news coming out of this Administration.”