The Trump White House on Friday replaced the covid.gov website that provided resources and information on COVID-19 with a webpage promoting the theory that the pandemic was a result of a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, which a House GOP panel strongly favored in a report released last year.
The address covid.gov now redirects to a White House webpage titled “Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19.” Prior to this change, covid.gov provided access to free testing for SARS-CoV-2 as it became available along with as information on masking, testing and treating infections.
Like the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded in a report released in December, the Trump administration’s webpage concludes that the lab leak is the most likely origin of COVID-19. The more than 500-page report is included on the site.
Criticisms of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), former chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and other entities active during the pandemic make up most of page.
“This administration prioritizes transparency over all else,” a senior administration official told Fox News Digital. “The American people deserve to know the truth about the COVID pandemic, and we will always find ways to reach communities with that message.”
“Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency,” the page states. “Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions.”
Earlier this year, the CIA said it favored the lab leak theory, though the assessment was made with low confidence.
The updated website prompted renewed enthusiasm on conservative social media. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) on the social media platform X praised the page, saying “the truth is coming to light.”
While members of the GOP have strongly pushed the lab leak theory, there is yet to be a broad consensus on where the virus originated from. As Mun-Keat Looi, features editor for the BMJ medical journal, wrote last year, “The trail for definitive, scientific evidence is cold.” This is largely due to the Chinese government refusing to share data and cooperate with international investigations.
Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins wrote in 2021 that difficulty in definitively identifying an origin of the virus is “not unusual.”
“Confirming with 100% certainty the origin of a virus is a long and complicated process. It took 14 years for scientists to find a single bat population that contained all the necessary genetic components of SARS-CoV, the virus that caused the 2003 SARS epidemic. We still do not know the origins of the 2014 Ebola outbreak,” Collins said in a statement.
