Kamala Harris interview on ‘The View’ unravels as hosts removed due to positive COVID tests
In a dramatic scene even for live television, hosts Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro were pulled from the show as Vice President Harris instead conducted the interview remotely.
The much-anticipated interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on The View on Friday quickly unraveled minutes before she was set to walk onstage, as co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro were removed from the show table after testing positive for COVID-19.
In a dramatic scene even for live television, Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Hostin and Navarro were seated at The View table ready for what would’ve been Vice President Harris’s first live televised, in-studio interview. Suddenly, show producers asked Hostin and Navarro to leave the table and walk off the set. Producers were coy as to why Hostin and Navarro were being pulled from the show.
“Should I introduce the vice president?” asked a confused Behar, to which she was told yes. But just as she began to welcome Harris, producers stopped her.
“Shall we dance? Let’s do a tap dance,” joked Behar before going to a commercial break.
“This is going to be a major news story any minute now,” Behar said when the show returned from commercial break. She then explained that Hostin and Navarro — who are both fully vaccinated — had tested positive for breakthrough cases of COVID. Behar and Haines were then left to entertain a live audience and millions of viewers as producers apparently scrambled to work with Secret Service to ensure the safety of the vice president.
Eventually, a producer told Behar that Harris would instead conduct the interview remotely — despite physically being in the building — as a safety precaution for protecting her health. While production continued to work on the show’s unexpected turn of events, Behar and Haines awkwardly answered questions from the live audience to stall time.
Ten minutes before the show’s end, Vice President Harris finally joined the show remotely for a much more truncated interview.
Harris addressed the shocking health status of Hostin and Navarro and used the opportunity to stress the importance of getting vaccinated. “Sunny and Ana are strong women and I know they’re fine, but it really also does speak to the fact that they’re vaccinated and vaccines really make all the difference because otherwise we would be concerned about hospitalization or worse,” Vice President Harris said.
Speaking further on the coronavirus pandemic, Harris added that “people gotta be responsible. I’ve been watching like many of you with heartache the videos of people who are in an ICU bed who did not get vaccinated pleading with their family members [to] please get vaccinated,” she said. Harris said that she thinks about the countless images of Americans holding their loved one’s hand as they are near death. “Don’t put your families through that,” she pleaded. “Folks just need to get vaccinated.”
Harris also addressed the controversy involving the mistreatment of Haitian migrants by U.S. border patrol this past weekend, calling the images “horrible” and “deeply troubling.”
“There’s been now an investigation being conducted, which I fully support, and there needs to be consequences and accountability,” she added. “Human beings shouldn’t be treated that way, and as we all know, it also invoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country [and] has been used against African Americans during times of slavery.”
Harris said she is happy that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is taking the incident seriously by launching the investigation.
When Haines asked Harris if the Biden administration would halt all deportations of Haitian migrants at the border and allow them to apply for asylum, Harris acknowledged the devastation that the island nation has experienced over the span of several years from the 2010 earthquake that killed over 200,000 Haitian people to major flooding due to hurricanes — as well as the recent assassination of its president.
“I feel strongly, the president feels strongly that we have to do more,” she said. Harris also mentioned that the administration had previously granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haiti and extended to over 100,000 migrants, including those seeking reunification with their families.
Despite the fact that The View did manage to still pull off their live interview with the vice president, the show quickly became a trending topic on the internet due to the chaotic COVID scare. More specifically, many pointed to the fact that Behar and Haines continuously coughed while on the set together.
“So wait, if two of the VACCINATED cohosts of @TheView are found to be positive for Covid, don’t the other two have to immediately go into quarantine?” tweeted one person.
According to NBC News White House correspondent Geoff Bennett, the White House confirmed that Vice President Harris “had no contact with hosts prior to the show.”
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