During the first open discussion session, Page asked Harris if she would take a COVID-19 vaccine if it was approved by the Trump administration.

"If the public health professionals -- if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it, absolutely," Harris said. "But if Donald Trump tells us I should take it -- that we should take it, I'm not taking it."

Page tried to move on to the next topic -- the role of the vice president -- but Pence used his uninterrupted two minutes to respond to Harris' comment on a potential vaccine and to criticize how the Obama administration handled the Swine Flu or H1N1 pandemic of 2009.

"We have five companies in phase three clinical trials and we're right now producing tens of millions of doses," the vice president said.  "So, the fact that you continue to undermine public confidence in a vaccine, if a vaccine emerges during the trump administration, I think is unconscionable."

"And senator, I just ask you, stop playing politics with peoples' lives. The reality is, that we will have a vaccine, we believe, before the end of this year," he added.

In light of the president's recent diagnosis, Page directly asked Pence, "How can you expect Americans to follow the administration's safety guidelines to protect themselves from COVID when you at the White House have not been doing so?"

"Well, the American people have demonstrated over the last eight months that, when given the facts, they're willing to put the health of their families and their neighbors and people they don't know first," Pence said.

Pence also addressed the Sept. 26 Rose Garden event during which social distancing and masks weren't enforced and after which several White House officials tested positive.

"Many of the people who were at that event, Susan, actually were tested for coronavirus, and it was an outdoor event which all of our scientists regularly and routinely advise," Pence said. "The difference here is, President Trump and I trust the American people to make choices in the best interest of their health."

Pence defended the White House's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that Trump "has put the health of America first." Pence pointed to the administration's early ban on travel to China, testing efforts and the efforts to research and administer a vaccine.

Pence also went after the plan the Biden campaign released to combat coronavirus, saying "it reads an awful lot like what President Trump and I, and our task force, have been doing every step of the way."

He said that the plan "looks a little bit like plagiarism," because of its similarity to the White House Coronavirus Task Force plan.

Harris hit back at Pence, citing the revelations that Trump downplayed the coronavirus to prevent panic.

"I want to ask the American people, how calm were you when you were panicked about where you were going to get your next roll of toilet paper, how calm were you when your kids were were sent home from school? How calm were you when your children couldn't see your parents because they were afraid they could kill them?" she said.

Trump's re-election campaign is looking to have the president return the campaign trail early next week, despite his COVID-19 diagnosis last Thursday and hospital stay over the weekend.

The campaign was forced to cancel five previously announced rallies due to the president's testing positive. Multiple sources tell ABC News the Trump team has begun working to nail down details for the president's return to the campaign trail and has considered an event -- possibly in Pennsylvania -- as early as next Monday.

ABC News' Will Steakin, Katherine Faulders and John Santucci

PENCE'S CLAIM: "When President Trump and I took office, America had gone through the slowest economic recovery since the great depression. ... We're going through a pandemic that lost 22 million jobs at the height, we've already added back 11.6 million jobs."

FACT CHECK: With September's jobs report, over 11.4 million jobs have been added since March. But job gains have slowed in the past three months, showing the recovery is starting to lose momentum.

In September, 661,000 jobs were added, which was worse than expectations. The unemployment rate also declined to 7.9%, better than expectations.

The jobs number represented a significant slowdown in the number of jobs added since the economy started opening up after the pandemic induced shutdown.

Airlines such as United and American notified over 30,000 employees that they would be laid off or furloughed because the federal aid expired. Disney, the parent company of ABC News, announced it was eliminating 28,000 theme park jobs in Florida and California, and Cineworld, parent company of Regal Cinemas, the second-largest theater chain in the United States, said Monday that it will close all of its U.S. and U.K. theaters indefinitely, affecting 45,000 employees. These positions weren't included in the September report.

In September, the number of permanent job losses increased by 345,000 to 3.8 million; this measure has risen by 2.5 million since February.

Though the expansion of the U.S. economy was slow under the start of the Obama administration during the Great Recession, in the final four years GDP growth was at a 2.3%, nearly similar to the 2.5% in the first three years of Trump, according to The Associated Press.

--ABC News' Justin Gomez, Layne Winn and Zunaira Zaki