Former President Trump’s adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday was caught on a hot mic calling Vice President Harris’s claims about the previous administration’s vaccine rollout “bullshit.”
Kudlow, the former director of the White House National Economic Council, appeared as a guest on Fox News’s “America Reports” before host Sandra Smith ended the segment showing a clip of Harris speaking to “Axios on HBO” and slamming the Trump administration’s COVID-19 vaccination plan.
During the interview clip shown, the vice president said, “In many ways we’re starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year.”
As Smith noted that Harris was making “some false claims,” Kudlow immediately responded with profanity while his audio was still being aired, saying “bullshit” repeatedly and calling Harris’s remarks “unbelievable falsehoods.”
The audio briefly cuts out before Smith is heard saying, “That is Larry Kudlow weighing in.”
As part of her full quote in the interview, Harris said, “There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations. We were leaving it to the states and the local leaders to try and figure it out.”
Critics of Harris’s remarks pointed to top infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci’s comments the day after President Biden’s inauguration that “we’re certainly not starting from scratch.”
But in a CNN interview, Fauci stood by the vice president, saying, “What the vice president was referring to is, what is the process of actually getting these doses into people?”
“That’s something that we had to get much better organized, now with getting the community vaccine centers, getting the pharmacies involved, getting mobile units involved, so that’s what I believe she was referring to,” he said.
Kudlow spoke on “America Reports” ahead of launching his new show on Fox Business on Tuesday.
He responded to his hot mic incident on his show, apologizing for the language he used.
“I’m not usually a guy who swears, but what the vice president said just burned me up and is simply not true, OK?” he said. “It is somewhere between cognitive dissonance and an outright falsehood lie.”
While acknowledging the administration did not do everything “perfectly,” he applauded Operation Warp Speed’s success in developing a vaccine and said by Inauguration Day, 1.3 million vaccines were being made per day.
More than 39.6 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, with more than 15 million getting both doses as of Tuesday evening, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.