Ana Navarro, one of two co-hosts who were pulled from ABC’s “The View” live on air Friday due to positive COVID-19 tests, has since revealed the results that caused the chaos were false positives.
Producers informed Navarro and Sunny Hostin in their earpieces halfway through Friday’s broadcast that they would have to leave the Hot Topics table, leaving Joy Behar and Sara Haines to conduct the rest of the show on their own. The remaining hosts often struggled to kill time, at one point taking questions from the audience, but often not being able to hear the questions that were muffled by their masks.
Friday’s drama was even more pronounced considering Navarro and Hostin were pulled just as Vice President Kamala Harris was on her way to the studio for an in-person interview. Even though Harris made it to the building, producers explained her appearance would end up taking place remotely from a separate room out of precaution.
“We were very excited to have the vice president come on ‘The View.’ And then all of a sudden it turned into an episode of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,'” Navarro said of Friday’s drama in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “It was just surreal.”
Navarro also revealed what she discovered behind the scenes. While waiting in her dressing room after being ushered out of the studio, Navarro said both the PCR and antigen tests she took came back false positive. She said she couldn’t speak to Hostin’s results out of privacy.
“So we took a rapid antigen test, and we took a PCR, both have come back false positive for me,” Navarro said.
Navarro also told Cooper that as a guest co-host for the talk show she gets tested weekly.
"The View" guest host Ana Navarro breaks down the awkward moment she and her co-host learned they had tested positive for Covid-19 while on-air. She has since tested negative.
"This is in the middle of live TV," says Navarro. "As you know, Anderson, the show must go on." pic.twitter.com/mlpp9hEO6L
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) September 25, 2021
“Feeling good and hoping it was just an inopportune, very public false positive,” Navarro tweeted as an update on Saturday. “Please get vaccinated and stay safe folks, so we can beat this damn thing, once and for all.”
She has since posted on social media that a third COVID test came back negative.
Whew!
Very thankful to have gotten a third negative PCR test result this afternoon.
Headed home to Chacha’s dad. pic.twitter.com/Gg3jY1xQwL— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) September 25, 2021
“Obviously what happened yesterday was a false positive, a very public, a very inopportune, a very melodramatic false positive. But fortunately we now tested three times. All three have been negative,” she added on Instagram.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha was among the critics who blasted “The View” for the awkward episode. He argued that not only was the manner in which the initial positive COVID results was handled a “train wreck,” but so too was the interview with Harris that followed. Behar and Haines, he noted, chose not to ask the vice president about the failed drone strike in Kabul, the confusion over booster shots, or France’s frustration with the U.S. over a lost submarine deal.
Concha said it was all designed to give the vice president “confidence” at a time when her approval ratings were slipping.
Story cited here.
