(WWJ) - President Joe Biden has canceled his upcoming trip to the Tri-City area after the White House announced the president again tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday afternoon.
The president was scheduled to travel to Hemlock, just outside Saginaw, on the day Michigan will hold its midterm primaries to discuss the billons of dollars in federal funding authorized last week by Congress and bolstered by his administration.
In a letter from White House physician Kevin C. O’Connor, Biden had tested negative for several days and this case appears be a rare occurrence of "rebound" after the president was treated for his first COVID infection with the anti-viral drug, Paxlovid.
“After testing negative on Tuesday evening, Wednesday morning, Thursday morning and Friday morning, the President tested positive again late Saturday morning,”
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O'Conner said Biden "has experienced no reemergence of symptoms, and continues to feel quite well" and "there is no reason to reinitiate treatment at this time."
The president will enter strict isolation at the White House for at least five days, per CDC guidelines, and until he tests negative.
The exact venue Biden was due to make his speech in Michigan was not made public, but he was going to travel to the area of the Hemlock Semiconductor plant, which produces polysilicon chips that go into solar panels.
He was due to discuss the newly-passed CHIPS Act, aimed to help the U.S. become more competitive against foreign markets while also addressing a persistent shortage of semiconductor microchips that has walloped the production of medical equipment, electronics and high-tech weapons.
But the automotive industry has suffered the hardest blow.
"We know there are cars now in parking lots across our state that are all fully built, but need chips to actually be delivered to the dealership," Sen. Gary Peters said on Tuesday. "Unfortunately, this production has primarily moved overseas to places like South Korea, Taiwan and China. So we need to onshore that. We've got to provide resources to incentivize the manufacture of these computer chips in the United Sates."
The U.S. currently produces 12% of the global semiconductor chip supply,
Roughly $280 billion in funding was passed by Congress on Thursday. The House and Senate worked on the package for the better part of a year to come up with legislation that satisfied both sides of the aisle.
The bill now moves to Biden's desk to be signed into law.
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