The White House has redirected COVID.gov to a new landing page titled "Lab Leak: True Origins of COVID-19," strongly pushing the theory that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a lab accident in China's Wuhan. The new page draws heavily from the final report of the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, published in December 2024. Until last week, COVID.gov provided public resources for Covid-19 testing, treatments, vaccines, and information about long Covid. Now, the updated site lays out five key arguments supporting the lab leak theory.
The White House outlines these five points: the virus has a biological feature "not found in nature"; data suggests all cases stemmed from a "single introduction into humans"; Wuhan hosts China's top SARS research laboratory; researchers at the Wuhan lab reportedly "were sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019"; and if Covid-19 had a natural origin, "evidence would have already surfaced."
The page also alleges that government officials, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, helped edit and promote a 2020 research paper that supported the natural origin theory of Covid-19. It further claims the paper was designed specifically to dismiss the lab leak idea. These accusations are not new. In the past, Dr. Fauci and the paper’s authors have strongly denied that the research was manipulated or had any hidden agenda.
The origin of Covid-19 has been one of the most heated debates since the pandemic began. Experts and agencies have mostly centered discussions around two possibilities: a natural jump from animals to humans or an accidental leak from a lab. However, without a "smoking gun" and limited access to critical raw data, the debate has remained clouded by circumstantial evidence.
In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report showing that while the intelligence community leaned slightly toward natural spillover, it was divided overall. A follow-up report in 2023 echoed that divide. US agencies generally agreed that the virus was not created as a biological weapon and that Chinese leaders likely had no prior knowledge of the outbreak.
The newly launched COVID.gov page features a prominent photo of Dr. Fauci alongside mention of the pardon he received from former US President Joe Biden, which covered "any offenses." It also accuses federal agencies such as the NIH and HHS of breaking transparency laws and failing to fully cooperate with Congressional investigations. However, these agencies did comply with FOIA requests and testified when summoned. The page further questions the effectiveness of pandemic measures like social distancing, masking, and lockdowns, and it criticizes how New York officials managed their Covid-19 response.
In 2024, Dr. Fauci testified before Congress about these accusations. He firmly denied claims that he covered up information or improperly influenced research. "The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false, and simply preposterous. I had no input into the content of the published paper," Fauci said during a June 2024 hearing. He added, "The second issue is a false accusation that I tried to cover up the possibility that the virus originated from a lab. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite."
This isn’t the first time the White House has taken a public stand on Covid-19's origins. In January, US President Donald Trump spoke at the World Economic Forum, sharing that the pandemic had damaged his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. "But, I like President Xi very much. I've always liked him. We always had a very good relationship. It was very strained with Covid coming out of Wuhan. Obviously, that strained it. I'm sure it strained it with a lot of people, but that strained our relationship," Trump had said.
Moreover, the White House has posted a new page on the origins of the coronavirus on its official website, supporting the theory that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory. The page accuses the media, politicians, health authorities, and US immunologist Anthony Fauci of pushing a "preferred narrative" that COVID-19 originated in nature. It mentions that Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus was first detected as spreading, is home to a research lab with a history of conducting virus research with "inadequate biosafety levels."
More than five years after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, it is still unclear whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or originated in a laboratory in China. The website also criticizes the most important rules from the coronavirus period - such as physical distancing, the wearing of masks, and lockdowns - as wrong.
In January 2025, one of the first acts of the new director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe, was to change his agency's assessment of the origin of the coronavirus, positing that it was likely a laboratory accident. The CIA assesses that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. At the beginning of December 2024, a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives had already presented a report supporting the laboratory theory.
Lothar Wieler, the former president of Germany's Robert Koch Institute, also considers the laboratory theory to be more likely. He recently told the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the lab leak theory should not be dismissed.
The Trump administration has replaced Covid.gov with a treatise on the “lab leak” theory. The site includes intense criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helmed national Covid policies under Donald Trump and Biden, the World Health Organization (WHO), and state leadership in New York. “This administration prioritizes transparency over all else,” according to a senior administration quoted in Fox News, in spite of evidence to the contrary. “The American people deserve to know the truth about the Covid pandemic and we will always find ways to reach communities with that message.”
While definitive answers about the virus’s beginnings are elusive and may never be known, scientists have argued as recently as August 2024 in the Journal of Virology that, while they remain open-minded, the weight of evidence favors a spillover event. Spillover events are thought to have started at least two other pandemics in recent human history, including the Sars-CoV-1 outbreak in China in 2003 and the 1918 influenza pandemic, which is believed to have started in the American Midwest by human-pig contact.
Notably, many scientists are concerned about H5N1 transmission among birds and dairy cows in the US because of its potential to infect humans. Meanwhile, the “lab leak” theory has received high-profile support from pundits and in the media, particularly in right-leaning circles. It has become the subject of Republican-led hearings, rationale for punishing leaders such as Fauci, and defunding scientific institutions such as the NIH.
“NIH’s procedures for funding and overseeing potentially dangerous research are deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security,” the Trump administration’s new website argues. “Further, NIH fostered an environment that promoted evading federal record-keeping laws,” the website claims. Messenger RNA technology, which powered Covid-19 vaccines and led to their swift development under the first Trump administration, has also come under attack.
Many leading critics of the government’s initial approach to Covid-19 now have leadership roles in the new Trump administration – including the health secretary and longtime vaccine skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who now leads the NIH.
