President Joe Biden has tested positive for COVID while campaigning and trying to fight back against widespread calls for him to drop out of the 2024 race due to his age.
The 81-year-old president Joe Biden was forced to cancel a speech in Las Vegas after taking a test when he started getting a runny nose and coughing.
He gingerly boarded Air Force One, using the shorter of the two sets of stairs, for a flight back to the East Coast to begin isolation.
Biden, who was not wearing a mask, gave a thumbs up, and said: ‘I feel good’.
The White House physician said Biden was feeling ‘general malaise’ on Thursday and will now self-isolate in Delaware.
The West Wing added that the president is vaccinated and boosted, and took a dose of Paxlovid on Wednesday afternoon.
Earlier on Wednesday he was speaking to supporters at a restaurant while Democrats reignited calls for him to step down from the 2024 presidential race.
In an interview this week he said he would only drop out if doctors told him to and he had a medical that made it necessary.
‘If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem,’ Biden said in an interview with BET newspaper.
The president’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, has said Biden is mentally and physically fit to serve as commander-in-chief.
But Democrats have questioned Biden’s fitness to serve since his debate performance against Donald Trump, where he fumbled for words and at times stared blankly into the camera.
Biden, meanwhile, has repeatedly changed the conditions on what it would take for him to step aside.
He told ABC News he would only drop out only if the ‘Lord almighty’ told him to. At a press conference in Washington D.C., he said he would stay in the race unless aides came to him with proof that he could never win
In his interview with BET’s Ed Gordon Biden said for the first time that he had expected to ‘move on’ from the presidency and ‘pass it on to somebody else’ after one term but decided to run again because he believed his ‘wisdom’ and experience would help heal the country.’
‘You may remember Ed, I said I was going to be a transitional candidate, and I thought I would be able to move on from this and pass it on to somebody else,’ Biden said. ‘But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided. And quite frankly, I think the only thing age brings is a little bit of wisdom.’
He added that ‘there’s more to do, and I’m reluctant to walk away from that.’
Janet Murguía, the CEO of Latino civil rights organization UnidosUS, said: ‘Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding. Regrettably I was just on the phone with President Biden.
‘And he shared his deep disappointment at not being able to join us this afternoon. The President has been at many events as we all know and he just tested positive for COVID. So of course we understand that he needs to take the precaution