On new website, Trump declares lab leak as ‘true origins’ of COVID

The Trump administration has replaced the government’s main portal for information about COVID-19 with a website arguing that the coronavirus leaked from a lab, throwing its weight behind a theory of the pandemic’s origins that is so far not backed by direct evidence and that has divided intelligence agencies.

Covid.gov and Covidtests.gov, federal websites that used to deliver information about COVID and allow people to order tests, now redirect to the lab leak webpage. Carrying an image of President Donald Trump flanked by the words “Lab Leak,” the new page is illustrated by a satellite image of Wuhan, China, the city where COVID began spreading, and says it will describe “the true origins of COVID-19.”

The website notes that the city is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a coronavirus lab that had been involved with research projects that some scientists considered dangerous. It also alludes to concerns that the lab had conducted its work under improper safety conditions. CIA officials cited those concerns when the agency recently shifted its position to favor the lab leak hypothesis.

But the page does not address other details about the early spread of the virus, like where patients lived and worked and genetic clues from an illegal wild-animal market in Wuhan where many cases were detected. Many scientists believe that information points to the virus having spilled from animals into people at the market.

Since Trump returned to office, White House officials have begun describing the lab leak theory as “confirmable truth.” The CIA shifted its assessment with “low confidence”; the agency’s decision was not based on new intelligence, but rather a closer look at evidence about safety conditions in Wuhan labs.

The White House stance masks uncertainty within the ranks of government intelligence agencies about the origins of the pandemic. Intelligence officials and scientists have noted that, since 2020, China has withheld crucial information that could have shed light on the question.

The Energy Department and the FBI have favored the idea that a lab leak might have caused the pandemic. Five intelligence bodies considered theories of a non-laboratory origin — that the coronavirus spread among animals in nature, and then jumped to people at the wild-animal market or another location — more likely.

A declassified report from Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2023 said researchers at the Wuhan virology institute probably failed to use sufficient safety measures at least sometimes. But, the report said, intelligence agencies have found nothing that tells them that work at the laboratory caused the pandemic.

That report was released two years after the Biden administration, in 2021, ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate anew the origins of the virus.

Around that same time, mainstream scientists called for an open investigation of the virus’s origins that took seriously the possibility of a lab leak. Some expressed frustration that colleagues earlier in the pandemic had been too quick to dismiss the idea, including experts chosen by the World Health Organization who wrote a report in collaboration with Chinese scientists.

Since then, inquiries by intelligence agencies and congressional investigators have yielded no definitive answers.

Researchers who specialize in tracing outbreaks, including some who joined calls for evenhanded investigations of the origins, also did additional analyses of early cases and viral genomes, including new clues that had emerged from China. Those analyses pointed to the pandemic’s starting at the illegal wild-animal market.

The Trump administration’s purging of the old COVID websites reflects a broader practice of officials recently scrapping health websites that do not align with their views, including ones related to climate change and LGBTQ+ people. (Some of those pages were later restored.)

And it has turned what used to be the government’s main portals for disseminating reliable information about the virus into a vehicle for attacking the administration’s political enemies, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led a federal research institute that awarded funding to a virus-hunting nonprofit that worked with scientists in Wuhan.

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