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| - Fact Check: This is not a Wuhan lab that Obama was visiting
At a time a vaccine against coronavirus may just become a reality, a set of images of former United States President Barack Obama and top American infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has gone viral, fuelling an old conspiracy theory.
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India Today Fact Check
The picture is of Obama and Fauci at a vaccine research centre at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, US, in 2014. Gates is not present in the picture.
At a time a vaccine against coronavirus may just become a reality, a set of images of former United States President Barack Obama and top American infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has gone viral, fuelling an old conspiracy theory.
The images showing Obama and Fauci, along with some others in a medical laboratory, have gone viral with the claim, “BREAKING: Obama, Fauci and Melinda Gates seen at a Wuhan Lab in China in 2015”.
Several Facebook and Twitter users have posted this set of pictures, hinting at a deeper conspiracy behind the worldwide spread of coronavirus.
Incidentally, some news reports have said that according to a Chinese virologist, coronavirus was created in a laboratory in China’s Wuhan.
India Today Anti Fake News War room (AFWA) found the claims along with the images to be misleading. The pictures are of Obama and Fauci at a vaccine research centre at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, US, in 2014. Gates is not present in the picture.
The archived versions of the viral posts can be seen here, here and here. The claim is being widely shared on Facebook.
Old images revived
Using the caption of the viral post, we found that the content seems to have originated from a blog published in July this year. The archived version can be seen here.
With the help of reverse image search on one of the viral pictures, we found that it is available in the archive gallery of the White House website.
The caption of the photo reads, “President Barack Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tour a lab at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Dec. 2, 2014. Dr. Nancy Sullivan, Senior Investigator, Chief Biodefense Research Section explains the labs investigational Ebola vaccine candidate currently being tested on humans.”
A similar picture is also available on the flickr handle of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases with a similar caption.
The woman standing beside Fauci is not Melinda Gates but the former health and human services secretary of the US, Sylvia Mathews Burwell.
Therefore, the viral claim along with the pictures saying Obama visited a Wuhan lab in 2015 along with other US officials is wrong. The pictures are of the former US President in a lab in Maryland. International fact-checking website Snopes had earlier debunked the claim.
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