Joe Biden contracts COVID-19 as pressure to exit presidential race mounts
Joe Biden has been forced to pull out of a speech after contracting COVID-19, as pressure on him to step aside continues to ramp up.
The president is experiencing mild symptoms, the White House said, including “general malaise” from the infection and has returned to his home to Delaware to self-isolate.
Mr Biden has insisted he is not dropping out of the race, despite fears his age could see him lose to Donald Trump in November.
But key figures within the Democratic Party continue to raise concerns, with both Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries speaking privately to the president.
On Wednesday, California congressman Adam Schiff, a close ally of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, became the highest-profile House Democrat to call for Biden to drop his reelection bid, saying that while the decision is Biden’s alone to make, he believes it’s time to “pass the torch”.
While the fallout from the assassination attempt against Mr Trump and the buzz around the Republican National Convention have taken some attention away from Mr Biden’s situation, Democrats know they have limited time to resolve the party turmoil after the president’s disastrous debate performance last month.
‘I feel good’
Mr Biden wasn’t wearing a mask as he boarded Air Force One from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.
Asked by the press how he was feeling, the 81-year-old said: “Good. I feel good.”
He then walked cautiously up the stairs to his plane.
An official said Mr Biden presented with upper respiratory symptoms, including a runny nose and a cough.
The president is vaccinated and boosted, they added. He has also been given a first dose of Paxlovid, an antiviral medicine that works by stopping the virus that causes COVID-19 from growing and spreading in the body.
It comes just hours after an excerpt from a recorded interview emerged in which Mr Biden said he would only consider dropping out of the presidential race with Mr Trump, if he was told to do so because of a medical condition.
Mr Biden was asked if there was anything which would make him rethink his candidacy for a second term in the White House during an interview with Ed Gordon of BET News.
“If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, ‘you got this problem and that problem’,” the president said.
David Blevins, Sky correspondent: The timing is a disaster
This couldn’t have come at a worse moment for President Biden.
The White House says his symptoms are “mild” but it will raise further questions about his health.
His doctor using terms like “upper respiratory symptoms” only adds to those concerns.
Republicans will be quick to contrast Donald Trump surviving a bullet, while Joe Biden is floored by a virus.
The timing is a disaster too – the positive result coinciding with another Democrat urging him to go.
That will fuel a barrage of conspiracy theories about the scale of moves afoot to replace him as a candidate.