The White House has been scrambling to contain the fallout from Vice President Kamala Harris’s statement on Friday in which she appeared to take a swipe at her boss, President Joe Biden, for not anticipating the Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus that have fueled a nationwide surge in newly diagnosed cases.
An administration official tried to put a positive spin on the vice president’s remarks, insisting that she meant that the president and his aides did not foresee the mutations.
‘The vice president’s comments referred to the exact kind of mutation,’ said a statement by a Harris adviser obtained by Fox News on Saturday.
The adviser said that the administration kept promoting vaccinations, masking and social distancing in case new variants would appear.
The clarification comes just a day after Harris got into a heated exchange with Comedy Central host Charlamagne Tha God who pressed her on whether Biden or Senator Joe Manchin, the Democratic legislator who has stood in the way of the president’s key agenda items, is ‘the real president.’
‘It’s Joe Biden, and don’t start talking like a Republican about asking whether or not he’s president. And I’m vice president and my name is Kamala Harris.’
Gin Duran, a Harris aide who quit after working with her for five months, said there’s a reason her office is experiencing such a large staff turnover. ‘Who are the next talented people you’re going to bring in and burn through and then have (them) pretend they’re retiring for positive reasons.’
In reality, the true number of Omicron cases is much higher, as only 1 to 2 percent of all cases are sequenced for variant markers.
The CDC estimates that Omicron accounts for at least 13 percent of all new cases in New York, which on Friday recorded its highest single-day tally of new Covid-19 cases ever at 21,027.
Testing has now confirmed the presence of Omicron in every US state except for Oklahoma, Montana, North and South Dakota, Indiana, and Vermont, though the eventual arrival of the highly transmissible variant in every state seems assured.
