President Donald Trump on Friday replaced the government’s utilitarian COVID-19 website with a gaudy page that pushes a disputed theory about the virus’s origins.
The web address covid.gov no longer features information on vaccines and testing. Now, it takes you to a site that says COVID-19 leaked out of a lab in China, disparages Dr. Anthony Fauci, and accuses the Biden administration of spreading “misinformation.”
At the top of the page is a huge illustration of Trump striding between the words “Lab Leak” in all-caps block letters. A smaller subtitle near the president’s feet reads, “the true origins of Covid-19.”
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While the page presents it as a settled fact that the virus emerged out of an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, China, the case is hardly closed. The so-called lab leak theory has circulated since the early days of the pandemic, because the first cases of the virus were detected in Wuhan.
While American intelligence agencies have remained open to the possibility that COVID-19 could have originated from lab research, the claim pushed by some lab leak proponents that it was created as a “biological weapon” has been dismissed.
In January, the CIA announced that its analysts believed it was more likely that the virus emerged out of a lab than a Wuhan wet market with live animals, which is a competing theory. However, the World Health Organization has said that “all hypotheses remain open.”
Trump’s page spurns skepticism. “By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t,” it says, wrongly.
The site also takes aim at several government officials for their responses to the pandemic, chiefly Fauci and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.
It alleges that a famous scientific study concluding that the virus likely wasn’t created in a lab “was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated naturally.”
In 2023, The Intercept reported that Fauci, a former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was one of a number of scientists in the pandemic’s early days who were weighing whether the virus was engineered. The study, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was part of an effort to rule that possibility out.
Trump’s page also highlights the fact that Biden gave Fauci a pardon before he left office, seeming to insinuate that this is a sign of guilt.
In early 2020, Cuomo earned national recognition for his insistence on measures to stop the virus spreading in New York. He also made waves for hosting televised conferences about COVID-19, in which he would fire shots at Trump.
Cuomo’s administration was later rebuked by a House panel for changing its methodology for tracking virus deaths in nursing homes to make the number seem lower than it actually was. Trump’s new site claims that Cuomo’s team “worked to cover up the tragic aftermath of their policy decisions in an apparent effort to shield themselves from accountability.”
The site links to a congressional report issued by the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which, like Trump’s page, concludes that the virus came from a lab, and criticizes the government’s response to the global pandemic.
