Jason Mast , 2025-04-18 17:33:00
A government website long used to provide the latest guidelines on managing Covid-19, as well as information on how to receive tests, vaccines and treatments has now been replaced with a page proclaiming the virus emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China and that Anthony Fauci, the Biden Administration and others worked to cover it up.
The website, Covid.gov, now opens to a banner reading “LAB LEAK, The True Origins of Covid-19”, with a picture of President Trump striding between the words “lab” and “leak.”
It goes on, after listing several claims on Covid’s origins and citing President Biden’s pardon of Fauci, to walk through a series of other right-wing concerns over the pandemic, around social distancing, mask mandates, lockdowns, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes, and White House and social media company efforts to push against “alternative treatments.”
“Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency,” it concludes in a section titled Covid-19 Misinformation. “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.”
The lab leak theory, debated at length over the past five years, had become a cause célèbre on the right.
Many Republicans argue former leaders at the National Institutes of Health suppressed discussion of the theory — Facebook banned posts promoting the idea of lab leak in February 2020, during the first Trump Administration — one of several grievances that then helped fuel Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
The new web page, on a site that had once provided basic public health information, is the latest effort by the new Trump administration and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reshape the nation’s public health agencies. “Alternative treatments” appears to be a reference to drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that Kennedy and others promoted after large studies had shown they were ineffective.
Covid.gov now redirects to whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19. Guidance on Covid-19, including information about tests, treatments and long Covid can still be found at https://www.cdc.gov/covid.
The idea that Covid-19 emerged from a lab — and not in a spillover from animals at a wet market or elsewhere — has gained support in the last couple of years. It was the subject of a 2024 House Republican report, as well as news articles in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and ProPublica, among other outlets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Energy, and the Central Intelligence Agency have each concluded a lab leak was the most probable origin, although the details of their analyses have largely not been made public and they didn’t rule out alternatives.
Many scientists, though, still point to a spillover as the most likely origin theory, pointing to a range of findings. That includes evidence potentially linking the coronavirus to raccoon dogs at the Hunan wet market; that early cases were clustered around the market; that genetic evidence suggests the virus only emerged at the very end of 2019.
“I just would like to compliment the branding,” said Angie Rasmussen, a researcher at University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatoon, Canada, who studies emerging viruses and has vocally argued for zoonotic spillover as the most likely cause. “It’s truly a triumph of graphic design but most of these points are not accurate.”
“I don’t know what to say,” adds Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research, who co-authored an early paper, now heavily criticized by lab leak proponents, arguing for zoonotic origin. “Factually, pretty much all of it is false — I don’t believe that any part is correct.”
For those who have argued for years that not only was the virus leaked from a lab, but was created in one through so-called gain-of-function research, the web page was seen as vindication. Richard Ebright, a Rutgers professor of microbiology, noted the site argues this was done with federal dollars given to a nonprofit.
“All of these things are true,” Ebright said of the page, saying the evidence is “only circumstantial to the extent that there has not been a confession and there is not a video tape.”
Rasmussen, though, said her concerns went beyond the argument over Covid’s origins. In its blistering attack on Fauci, Health and Human Services and the NIH, she saw an attempt to justify the restructuring of America’s public health agencies and the sweeping cuts the administration is now making to public health and biomedical research.
“I think what’s more important is that people understand what the purpose of this document is,” she said. “It is not to actually get to the true origins of COVID-19.”