President Joe Biden on Thursday called his vice president, Kamala Harris, "President Harris" while offering an update about the vaccine rollout in the United States.
Biden's administration is expected to its goal of 100 million COVID-19 vaccinations on Friday, just 58 days after he assumed office. In his speech, Biden said that while the number is encouraging, the country still has much work to do before it can declare victory against the deadly virus that has claimed the lives of 540,000 Americans so far.
During his speech, Biden was talking about how his administration was supplying vaccines to community health centers serving Black, Latino, Native American, and rural communities when he accidentally referred to his vice president as "President Harris"
'President Harris and I'
"We believe that speed and efficiency must be matched with fairness and equity. Now, when President Harris and I took ..." Biden said before momentarily pausing, "a virtual tour of a vaccination site in Arizona not long ago, one of the nurses on that tour injecting people, giving vax each shot, was like administering a dose of hope."
The video has now gone viral on social media, causing "President Harris" to trend on Twitter. Conservatives, including former President Donald Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr. seized on the opportunity and tweeted out the video footage criticizing Biden's capabilities.
Biden Has Previously Called Harris 'President'
This is not the first time Biden has referred to Harris as the president. In December, he referred to his second-in-command as the president-elect while discussing how they publicly received the COVID-19 vaccination.
"I took it to instill public confidence in the vaccine. President-elect Harris took hers today for the same reason," Biden said at the time. During the presidential campaign last year, Donald Trump frequently accused Biden of being mentally unfit to serve as the president and claimed Democrats would invoke the 25th amendment to replace Biden with Harris.
In a Democratic debate in July 2019, Biden also called his opponent Sen. Corey Booker, D-N.J., the president. While criticizing Booker's criminal justice plan, he said, "The fact is that the bills that the president, excuse me, the future president, that the senator is talking about, are bills that were passed years ago and they were passed overwhelmingly."
