Trump remodels COVID-19 support website into lab leak ‘truth’ page

The Trump administration has replaced the US government’s main portal for information about COVID-19 with a website arguing that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab.

The move throws the White House’s weight behind a theory of the virus’s origins that is so far not backed by direct evidence and that many scientists consider less likely than the idea that it emerged at a wild-animal market.

Government websites that used to deliver information about COVID-19 and allow people to order tests now redirect to this lab leak webpage.

Covid.gov and Covidtests.gov – government websites that used to deliver information about COVID-19 and allow people to order tests – now redirect to the lab leak webpage.

Carrying an image of US 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-19 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 same concerns when the agency recently shifted its position to favour a lab leak.

But the page sidesteps holes in that theory – large Chinese cities, for example, have labs that reported studying viruses like those the Wuhan institute worked on – and does not address the considerable evidence from early cases and viral genomes that the virus instead spilled from animals into humans at an illegal wild-animal market. It also cites misleading or heavily contested claims.

A map of a part of Wuhan, as it appears on Covid.gov.

The purging of old COVID-19 websites reflects a broader practice by the Trump administration of scrapping health websites that do not align with its 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 non-profit that worked with scientists in Wuhan.

While COVID-19 is killing far fewer people than at the height of the pandemic, the US has continued to record hundreds of COVID deaths each week in recent months.

In addition to arguing for a lab leak, the website condemns the World Health Organisation for its decisions during the pandemic and criticises measures that were used in efforts to prevent the early spread of COVID, such as lockdowns and masking.

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

The new website’s case for a lab leak contains significant inaccuracies. It begins by saying, of COVID, that “the virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature”. That appears to be a reference to the furin cleavage site, a feature that helps the virus get inside cells.

In the very early days of the pandemic, scientists were alarmed by the presence of that feature of the virus. But as they studied it more closely, they found that furin cleavage sites are in fact common in other coronaviruses, even if they have not so far been detected in the closest known relatives of the pandemic virus.

Scientists who have scrutinised the furin cleavage site have said it contains many features showing it was not engineered. They have argued, in fact, that constructing a virus in a lab would most likely result in that site being deleted.

A security official moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2021.Credit: AP/Ng Han Guan

The new website also says that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019,” suggesting that the virus was spreading at the lab before it began infecting people at the wild-animal market.

But a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declassified in 2023, complicates that assessment. That report says that “some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19”.

The workers, the report concludes, “experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19”.

That report was released two years after the Biden administration, in 2021, ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate 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 scientists expressed frustration that colleagues earlier in the pandemic had been too quick to dismiss the theory, including in a report by WHO-chosen experts in collaboration with Chinese scientists.

But since that time, researchers who specialise in tracing outbreaks, including some who joined calls for evenhanded investigations of the origins, have published detailed analyses of early cases and viral genomes that pointed to the pandemic’s starting at an illegal wild-animal market in Wuhan.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.