Kayleigh McEnany requests fact check after Obama coronavirus vaccine comment goes viral

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany demanded a Twitter fact check Tuesday after a video clip of her discussing former President Barack Obama's handling of the swine flu epidemic was taken taken to imply she was criticizing the previous administration for the COVID-19 outbreak. 

"This is a blatant LIE," McEnany tweeted in response to Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, who shared a tweet with the truncated video, which was taken from a Fox News interview. In his tweet, Tribe wrote, "@PressSec says Obama & Biden 'promised a vaccine' for Covid-19 in 2016? Although Covid-19 first appeared in 2020? wut?" 

McEnany shared a longer version of the video "where I clearly mention Swine Flu & the failed Obama/Biden response."

"Will @Twitter fact check?" she asked. 

In the longer clip, McEnany praises President Donald Trump's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and tells the "Fox & Friends" hosts Trump "tore through bureaucratic barriers so we can get a safe, effective and timely vaccine."

"And once again, compare that to Obama-Biden where they promised a vaccine, they vastly underperformed, and you have Biden's adviser – back in the Obama-Biden days – saying it's a pure miracle, fortuity that swine flu wasn't a mass casualty event of our time," she said. 

The shortened, 12-second clip cuts off after McEnany says "Biden's adviser." That version had 2.6 million views as of Wednesday morning. 

Tribe was not the only high-profile Twitter user to share the video.

"The virus didn't exist, did the interviewer mention that??" asked Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. 

"The level of lying is to be expected. The level of ignorance combined with lying sets a new low for Kayleigh," wrote Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. 

McEnany's criticism of the Obama administration on the swine flu echoed one Trump has leveled several times, though fact checkers dispute the accuracy of the president's claims. 

In a tweet on Thursday, Trump said Biden did "a terrible job on a much easier situation" than the COVID-19 outbreak. The "OBiden Administration failed badly on this," he added. 

The swine flu, or H1N1 virus, hit the U.S. in April 2009, just three months after Obama took office. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 12,500 people in the U.S. died from the swine flu in the 12 months that followed. The coronavirus has killed nearly 190,000 Americans in about six months. 

In May 2019, former Vice President Joe Biden's former chief of staff Ron Klain said at a biosecurity conference that the Obama administration had "a bunch of really talented, really great people working on" the swine flu response "and we did every possible thing wrong." 

Klain said it was" purely a fortuity" that the swine flu epidemic wasn't "one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck." 

Klain, who has touted Biden as better suited to handling the current pandemic than Trump, told Politico earlier this year those remarks had been solely about the problems the administration faced in delivering enough vaccine doses to meet demand. He said the Obama team would have responded more effectively to the problems faced by the Trump administration, such as the shortage of protective equipment. And he said they would have deferred more to public health experts. 

Fact check:Was the swine flu response in 2009 a 'disaster' as President Trump said?

Despite McEnany and Trump's criticisms of the Obama administration's response, many experts have given the government good marks for its handling of the swine flu. 

A 2012 Health and Human Services analysis of the federal government's response identified the "successes" and "opportunities for improvement" in its tackling of the outbreak. The report praised the quick development of vaccines, but criticized the speed at which the doses reached the public. 

The Food and Drug Administration approved four vaccines by September 2009. But the HHS report found "even though the six-month goals for initial vaccine delivery were met, most of the vaccine arrived too late to vaccinate much of the public before the pandemic peaked" because of "delays in production and delivery." 

Though it did not arrive before the peak number of infections, 80 million Americans were vaccinated within four months, the report said. 

In 2010, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University, told The New York Times that federal officials earned "at least a B-plus" for their response. Dr. Peter Palese, a virologist at Mount Sinai Medical School, told the Times the overall federal response was "excellent."