A photo claims to show President Obama, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Melinda Gates at a laboratory in Wuhan in 2015, a few years before the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak first surfaced.
An example of the photo can be seen below.
The claim is false. While the photo is real and really does show President Obama and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the photo was not taken at a laboratory in Wuhan, nor does it show Melinda Gates.
A very brief reverse image search – a search that presumably the “QAnon” conspiracy theorists who have been peddling this claim couldn’t perform – reveals that the photo was taken in 2014 at the Vaccine Research Center, which is part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
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The same photo and many others even appear on the National Institutes of Health website shortly after the trip.
The photo above contained the below caption –
President Obama visits the Vaccine Research Center, December 2, 2014.
The same page links to the NIAID Flickr upload of the same photos, and the account identifies the woman behind President Obama has then Health and Human Secretary Sylvia Burwell and the person standing next to Obama as Dr. Nancy Sullivan.
The photo is one of many examples of misinformation circulating online that purport to promote a narrative that President Obama and other influential or powerful entities engineered the COVID-19 outbreak or directly funded it. As with all the examples of such information we’ve seen, this claim falls down after a cursory examination.
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