Joe Biden, the 79-year-old President of the United States, tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday July 21 with “very mild symptoms”, according to the White House.
[Mis à jour le 22 juillet à 16h01] United States President Joe Biden announced that he tested positive for coronavirus on Thursday, July 21, 2022. In a video shared on Twitter, he said: “I am doubly vaccinated, with two booster doses, the symptoms are light.” The state of health of the man, aged 79, is often questioned by his detractors. The White House has indicated that Joe Biden is being treated with Paxlovid, Pfizer’s anti-Covid drug. While waiting for his tests to be negative, the president remains in solitary confinement, said White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, who added: “He will participate in the meetings scheduled for this morning at the White House by telephone and by Zoom.”
The White House has promised to communicate daily on the state of health of the President of the United States. A trip scheduled for Thursday in Pennsylvania and another scheduled for Florida, Monday July 25, have been canceled. At 79, Joe Biden is the oldest president ever elected in the country. Rumors about his state of health have multiplied since his election as head of the United States. On Thursday, July 21, he shared a post on Twitter saying “guys I’m doing great.” He also posted a video in which he explains that having received four doses of vaccines, he felt well and continued to work. He concludes his message by saying “keep the faith, it will be fine”.
Joe Biden ended up catching Covid-19, after multiple tests carried out, the last negative of which dated from July 19, 2022, when the president was back from a tour of Israel and Saudi Arabia. With a complete vaccination schedule, including two booster doses, the president has often spoken out to encourage Americans to visit vaccination centers, going so far as to stage his third dose of the vaccine live on television. American in September. In addition, aware of the concern about his advanced age, he had made public a medical examination in November 2021; he was described there as “sturdy” and “fit” to perform his duties.
Joe Biden’s positive test comes the day after a widely publicized statement about his state of health. In a July 20 speech in Massachusetts aimed at raising awareness about climate change, the president uttered words that may have suggested he had cancer. Indeed, when he was speaking to journalists in front of a very polluting old coal-fired power station, he drew a parallel between the pollution problems linked to oil refineries and the large number of cancers that are plaguing the country. “You had to [y] put on your windshield wipers to literally remove a slick of oil from the windshield […]. This is why I, and several people I grew up with, have cancer” were his exact words, triggering a shower of comments from Internet users convinced that he had just confessed to a long-hidden disease. In reality, he was referring to non-melanoma skin cancers he was treated for before taking office, as Deputy White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates clarified on Twitter.
Joe Biden was born on November 20, 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He served for 36 years as a senator from Delaware, from 1973 to 2009, before coming into the limelight by becoming Barack Obama’s vice-president. He will remain in this position during the two terms of the 44th President of the United States, until 2017. Of Catholic faith and of modest origin, Joe Biden studied history and political science in Delaware, where his family is installed. He continued his law studies in New York and became a lawyer.
Aged 79 today, he began his career in politics in 1970, when he became elected to the county council of New Castle before, two years later, becoming a senator. He decides to run for the 2020 Democratic primary for the presidential election against, in particular, Bernie Sanders. The latter, from the left wing of the party, started strong and Joe Biden suffered several disappointments, before rebalancing the debates thanks to the numerous support of the candidates of the centrist wing. The coronavirus pandemic got the better of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who abandoned the race.
The 46ᵉ president of the United States has experienced several dramatic moments in his private life. After meeting his wife, Neilia Hunter, at a very young age, at university, the couple gave birth to three children. In 1972, the latter and his wife were victims of a serious road accident, causing the death of his daughter, Naomi Christina, thirteen months, and Neilia Hunter, aged 30. The Democrat finds himself with his two sons, Beau, who died in 2015 of brain cancer, and Hunter, whom he educates alone, until his remarriage with Jill Tracy Jacobs in 1977 and with whom he still shares his life today. The couple gave birth to a daughter, Ashley, born in 1981.