The Trump administration changed a government COVID-19 website to include assertions that the virus’s true origins are likely from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and to fault a number of entities and individuals for how they handled the pandemic response.
A White House press officer, Anna Kelly, appeared to confirm the change on social media platform X on Friday, including a link to the covid.gov page that, under the Biden administration, included information on how to order COVID-19 tests, vaccines, and treatment, as well as information on “long COVID,” symptoms, and other details.
The page now displays an image of President Donald Trump walking forward ahead of the text “LAB LEAK” and “The true origins of COVID-19.”
On the webpage, the administration criticizes former White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, who left the government in 2022, saying he tried to downplay the theory that the virus was associated with a lab leak in China. It also suggested that a study published in the journal Nature was unfairly used to discredit the theory that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab.
“Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels,” the website states.
Lab researchers in Wuhan, it says, were ill with COVID-19-like symptoms in late 2019, or months before COVID-19 was discovered at a nearby wet market in Wuhan. The lab also had a history of unsafe practices and performing controversial research, the website says.
“By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t,” the administration says of COVID-19.
The Trump administration faulted EcoHealth Alliance, which had used taxpayer funding to engage in gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab, in which researchers genetically alter an organism to enhance its biological functions. The Department of Health and Human Services later barred funding to EcoHealth.
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