On May 20, during a Rose Garden event celebrating Jewish American Heritage month, Biden said one of the U.S. hostages held in Gaza was a guest at the White House event, before correcting himself. One day earlier, at a campaign event in Detroit, he indicated that he was vice president during the Covid-19 pandemic, which started three years after he left that office. It was one of numerous flubs in the single speech that prompted the White House to make corrections to the official transcript. In January, he mixed up two of his Hispanic cabinet secretaries, Alejandro Mayorkas and Xavier Becerra. During a February fundraiser in New York, he recounted speaking to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl—who died in 2017—at the 2021 Group of Seven meeting. That same month, at a different fundraiser, he said that during the 2021 G-7 summit he had spoken to former French President François Mitterrand, who died in 1996.