U.S President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020. T. Narayan | Bloomberg via Getty Images

The White House said Tuesday that President Donald Trump was referring to Ebola — not the deadly coronavirus — when he claimed that "we're very close to a vaccine." Trump discussed the fast-spreading virus, which has killed more than 2,700 people and infected tens of thousands more, at a press conference during a state visit to India. The U.S. in late January imposed travel restrictions and quarantines in response to the spread of the coronavirus.

An NBC News reporter asked the president whether his administration's response to the coronavirus squared with his criticism in 2014 of President Barack Obama's handling of the Ebola outbreak. "Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days - now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent," Trump wrote in a July 31, 2014, tweet. "KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!" But Trump said Tuesday there was a "big difference" between the coronavirus and Ebola, which carried an extremely high death rate at its peak. "We're still working on Ebola," Trump said. "We're doing a vaccine ... we're still working on that." With coronavirus, the death rate is currently closer to "1 or 2 percent," Trump said. "In the other case it was a virtual 100 percent. Now they have it, they have studied it, they know very much. In fact, we're very close to a vaccine," Trump said. White House spokesman Judd Deere told CNBC later Tuesday that Trump "was talking about the Ebola vaccine."