The US President Joe Biden made quite the numerical error during a speech, as he told listeners 350 million Americans had already been vaccinated.
According to the latest census, released in April this year, the entire population of the United States is 331 million, Washington Examiner reported.
Biden was delivering remarks about the July Jobs report from the White House when he made the comment on Friday.
“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. So we have to get more people vaccinated,” he said.
Biden paused briefly to check his notes, saying: “Well over – what’s the number again, I’ll remind myself – 350 million Americans have already been vaccinated. They’re doing fine.”
It’s possible Biden had mistakenly referred to the number of vaccine doses administered in the United States, which is almost 350 million. The actual number of fully vaccinated Americans is 166 million, i.e. approximately half the population.
Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Biden’s career will know he is prone to verbal slip-ups. The president has even referred to himself in the past as “a gaffe machine”.
Just last week Biden confused former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama in a speech to Mack Trucks assembly plant in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. He caught his own error, saying it had been a Freudian slip.
Biden said, “Back in 2009, during the so-called Great Recession, the president asked me to be in charge of managing that piece, then-President Trump. Excuse me, Freudian slip, that was the last president. He caused the ... anyway, President Obama, when I was vice president.”
RHM/PR