My understanding of the microfiche is that the reel Obama would’ve been on is missing.
Not so. There is no confirmation of that. What is missing according to Zullo are the landing cards for the two week period prior to and after Obama’s birth. They were looking to see if Ann Dunham had arrived in the US during that time.
Long ago an Obama operative of sorts told me that destroying original birth records would be acceptable to make storage space as long as they had been digitized.
FYI - I used to work in a gov program that funded the digitization of valuable items, not birth certificates but historic documents like newspapers and such. Number one, you do not destroy originals—they are preserved after digitization. Digitization is primarilly done for improved access and sharing, not so you can save space by tossing out originals. As many of you know, our government will always buy enough storage space to store what it considers important. Also, the biggest reason for preserving originals is that technology changes and systems crash and xyz happens so you would never destroy the original of something as important as a birth certificate.
In my mind, anyone who would authorize the destruction of original birth documents of a living person is a sick criminal.