The party’s over.
Former President Barack Obama has cancelled his controversial 60th birthday bash in Martha’s Vineyard, citing the spread of the coronavirus’s Delta variant.
“Due to the new spread of the Delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends,” Obama’s spokeswoman Hannah Hankins said in a statement Wednesday morning, The New York Times reported.
“He’s appreciative of others sending their birthday wishes from afar and looks forward to seeing people soon,” she added.
Obama’s decision follows a report by The Post, which cited a source as saying the former president was creating a public health “nightmare” by trying to get nearly 700 people to his party amid a national surge of the variant and new restrictions.
George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey were among the 475 guests expected to attend alongside about 200 hired hands.
Former top Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Times: “They’ve been concerned about the virus from the beginning, asking invited guests if they had been vaccinated, requesting that they get a test proximate to the event.”
He added: “But when this was planned, the situation was quite different. So they responded to the changing circumstances.”
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was pressed on the massive shindig — and defended it.
Asked if Obama was “setting the wrong example about how serious COVID-19 is by hosting a big birthday party with hundreds of people,” Psaki said that the venue is within a county classified by the CDC as having only moderate coronavirus transmission — though there’s an outbreak of the more contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 nearby on Cape Cod, which is just over 50 miles away.