I knew as soon as I saw it that it was fake because we know your track record. We also know that you don't give a single **** if it wasn't true.
"No, this is false — it's a well-known piece of misinformation that's been circulating since 2020, and multiple fact-checkers have debunked it (Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, AFP, Logically Facts).
The photo is real, but misrepresented:
- Location: It was taken in December 2014 at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland — not at any lab in Wuhan, China.
- Who's in it: Obama and Fauci with U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell and Chief of the Biodefense Research Section Nancy Sullivan. Melinda Gates isn't in the photo at all — the woman in red is Sylvia Burwell.
- Context: Obama was visiting the NIH campus to see progress being made against Ebola, not studying coronaviruses.
On the funding claim: it's also distorted. In 2014, NIAID began funding a research project in China run by EcoHealth Alliance, testing bats in southern China to identify coronaviruses. The organization received roughly $3.4 million as part of the first grant, but EcoHealth's spokesman said only $600,000 from the first grant actually went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — nowhere near the "$5 million" or "$3.7 million" figures that circulate in versions of this claim, and that money didn't come from Obama personally or in 2015 specifically.
So the image splices a real 2014 NIH photo with a false caption to imply foreknowledge of the pandemic — it's a fairly textbook example of a misleading meme built on a genuine but recontextualized photo.