The White House on Friday launched a website deeming a laboratory leak as the “true” origin of the covid-19 virus, embracing a theory that has become a popular explanation for a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans but remains divisive in the intelligence community and opposed by many virologists.
The new website, which features an image of President Donald Trump striding between the words “Lab Leak,” appears to draw entirely upon a report overseen by House Republicans last year, which concluded the outbreak began with a lab leak in China. The White House site also echoes the report’s allegations that Anthony S. Fauci, a former senior National Institutes of Health official who became a target of Trump’s ire, “prompted”scientists to instead focus on a possible “natural” explanation for the outbreak that included a potential virus spreading to humans from a Wuhan market where wild animals were sold.
“By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t,” the White House website reads, encouraging visitors to download the embedded House Republicans’ report.
Five years after the nation shut down to combat the novel coronavirus, the virus’s threat has receded – but the fights over pandemic policy have not.Trump and his allies have blamed advice from Fauci and other federal officials for some of the harshest measures, such as social distancing rules that led to school shutdowns and business closures. Democrats have blamed Trump’s own efforts to initially downplay the virus’s threat and his hesitation to encourage supporters to seek out lifesaving coronavirus vaccines. States are currently fighting the Trump administration’s attempt to claw back more than $11 billion in coronavirus funds from their health departments, saying it will weaken their ability to respond to public health threats.
Meanwhile, scientists have acknowledged questions over the value of risky virus research that was being conducted in Wuhan and other sites, calling for tighter controls on what are known as “gain-of-function” experiments, where live pathogens can be altered to become more deadly.
Republicans hailed the White House site, calling it an overdue effort at accountability.
“President Trump is rightfully providing the American people with the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic,” Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), who chairs the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement. Comer’s panel oversaw the pandemic report that underpins the new site.
Democrats and scientists countered that the Trump administration has embraced unproven claims to attack scientists and the institutions that support them.
“The White House is declaring its own scientific truth, which goes against the published science on this issue,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It just appeals to this notion of conspiracy, that there are forces working behind the scenes that mean to do us harm.”
No Democrat on the House panel investigating the federal pandemic response signed onto the GOP-led report last year, instead releasing a rebuttal that acknowledged the possibility of a lab-leak but said that Republicans had wrongly embraced it to conduct political attacks on scientists. Fauci has previously denied wrongdoing, pointing to an email sent in early 2020, where the then-NIH official discussed the need to alert authorities if scientists uncovered evidence that the virus had been man-made. The scientists who worked on a key paper that shaped the early debate around the pandemic’s potential cause, known as “Proximal Origins,” testified to Congress that Fauci did not influence their findings.
The Trump administration’s new lab-leak website also replaced a five-year-old webpage, Covid.gov, that was first set up to share resources and information for Americans on how to fight the virus, including how to access free coronavirus tests, seek treatment or how to stay up-to-date on vaccination to “protect you and your loved ones.” It also highlighted resources for those suffering from long covid.
Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physicianand senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, criticized the White House for removing public health information from a website in favor of a page intended to “score partisan points.” He also said that the origin of the pandemic remains an open question, and that he is open to both the lab-leak and natural origin theories.
“The Trump administration is rewriting some of history and making covid-19 out to be a political event rather than a biological event that happened,” Adalja said.
The CIA said in January that it now favors a Chineselaboratory leak as the mostly likely origin of the coronavirus pandemic, joining the FBI and the Energy Department in that assessment. Four intelligence agencies and a national intelligence panel have favored the theory that the virus first infected humans through animal transmission. There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, was in any laboratory before the outbreak.
Some evolutionary biologists and experts have insisted that a spillover event is the most likely source of the pandemic, citing recent reviews they say bolster evidence of a natural origin.
The war for public opinion was won long ago: Polls have found that about two-thirds of Americans believe that the pandemic began with a lab leak in China.
The White House did not respond to questions about whether the Trump administration had obtained additional information about the virus’s origins. A spokesman said that the new website was part of its effort to be “the most transparent administration in U.S. history.”
“Nothing will stop us from innovating and finding creative ways to uphold our end of the bargain,” White House spokesman Kaelan Dorr wrote in a statement.
Fauci declined comment.
Brad Wenstrup, a former Ohio congressman who served as the top Republican overseeing the House oversight panel’s coronavirus investigation, praised the White House for amplifying his team’s conclusions. The report, which followed a two-year probe, unearthed evidence of a former Fauci deputy who encouraged colleagues to evade federal records requirements and deleted emails about the pandemic. The panel also targeted an organization involved in risky virus research in Wuhan and then-New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s pandemic response, with Democrats echoing some of their GOP colleagues’ criticisms. Some scientists testified to the panel that they believed a lab-leak was the most plausible explanation for the outbreak.
“We’re very proud of our work,” said Wenstrup, who Trump appointed to a presidential intelligence advisory board earlier this year. He also called for further investigation into the events that led up to the pandemic. “There were clear cover-ups by the Chinese, there were cover-ups by our own government, and there were cover-ups, in my opinion, by international scientists who do gain-of-function research,” Wenstrup said.
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-California), who served as the coronavirus panel’s top Democrat, criticized the White House’s decision to remove and replace the existing coronavirus website as a “disgraceful attempt” to cover up Trump’s own failures in responding to the pandemic in early 2020. He also called the new lab-leak site a “reckless” decision to amplify political tensions, rather than focusing on lessons learned.
“This is yet another example of the Trump administration’s complete prioritization of politics over science and public health,” Ruiz said, saying that a recent measles outbreak shows the need to shore up bipartisan confidence in public health. The move comes amid the administration’s claw back of $11.4 billion on coronavirus funds sent to state and local health departments, which officials say has hurt the current measles response in Texas.
Ruiz also said he was alarmed about the potential risks to Fauci, who has said that he is still facing credible threats that began during the pandemic. Trump in January ended Fauci’s government-provided security detail after nearly five years, saying that former government officials should not expect security for the rest of their lives.
“I am very concerned they are going to get Dr. Fauci killed,” Ruiz said. “They took away his security clearance and post these horrible false accusations to further enrage their base. They have no shame.”
Outgoing President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci in one of his final acts in office this year, with the former president and Fauci both saying that he had committed no crime but faced threats from the incoming administration.Biden’s pardon was prominently displayed on the new site, with some Republicans arguing that it serves as evidence of Fauci’s guilt.
The possibility that the pandemic was sparked by a laboratory leak was initially dismissed by many scientists, including some who have subsequently said they are open to it, and played down by members of the media. A March 2020 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of Americans believed the virus emerged naturally, but about 3 in 10 thought it was created either intentionally or accidentally in a lab.
But by June 2021, majorities of Democrats and Republicans believed that a laboratory leak in China had sparked the pandemic, according to a poll conducted by Politico-Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Subsequent polls have showed stronger support for the lab-leak theory, including a March 2023 Economist-YouGov poll that found 66 percent of Americans believed it.
Lingering frustrations around the pandemic have helped contribute to fading confidence in public health agencies and the people who lead them, with sharp partisan splits. Eighty-six percent of Democrats said they trusted Fauci to provide information about coronavirus vaccines, compared to 25 percent of Republicans, according to an April 2022 poll by KFF, a nonpartisan health care research and polling operation.
Meanwhile, the percentage of adults who regarded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “excellent” or “good” fell from 64 percent in April 2019 to 40 percent in October 2021 – a rating that has stubbornly refused to budge in the subsequent three years, according to Gallup polls, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to rebuild confidence. Other surveys found similar declines in trust and approval for agencies and their leaders, driven by GOP skepticism.
“Americans need facts, not fear,” said Ruiz, the Democratic congressman. “They need access to vaccines, testing, and treatment – not conspiracy theories.”