For the past two weeks, Governor Gavin Newsom has been out of the public eye. That is until Tuesday.
He took part in a state economic summit in Monterey, which marked his first public appearance since he received his COVID-19 vaccine booster shot in Oakland.
Just two days later, the governor abruptly canceled his plans to attend the U.N. climate conference in Scotland, which his office said was due to "family obligations."
What that meant has been, well, unclear since then.
But Newsom said that even after a year of dealing with wildfires, COVID-19 and the recall election, he and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, were still gearing up to leave for Scotland until their kids sat them down in what he described as an "intervention."
"Y'know, mom and dad missing Halloween — for them, is worse than ... missing Christmas," Newsom explained. "And I woke up that next morning with, something that's probably familiar to a lot of parents, that knot in your stomach? That I had no damn choice, I had to cancel that trip."
His sudden absence fueled speculation on social media about his whereabouts, as well as the state of his health.
Newsom was quick to point out that he received his flu shot, and insisted he wasn't feeling any side effects from his Moderna booster shot.
But he also warned that California is experiencing an increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, which he attributed to the seasonality of the coronavirus. Newsom is scheduled to appear at a vaccination event in Los Angeles County on Wednesday morning.
