On Friday, the White House launched a new website on which the theory was revived that the coronavirus is a man-made pathogen that escaped from an infectious disease laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The page gives new life to the long debate about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been the subject of investigations by federal agencies, global health organizations and congressional committees. In January, the CIA issued a report stating that a lab leak could be considered a “likely” lead, but not a certainty.
The World Health Organization said it was open to all hypotheses, including that the virus spread from animals to people in a Wuhan market. However, many scientists said the origin of Covid may remain a puzzle.
On the website launched by the White House, it says that the virus “possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature” and “if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”
In several ways, the new page echoes a final report released last year by the Republican-led House Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic which concluded that the virus originated in the lab; Democrats, however, released a separate report that did not draw a definitive conclusion about the virus’ origins.
The new site also details what are called “failures” in the fight against Covid-19, including the lockdown, mask obligations, funding for infectious disease research, and HHS’s “obstruction” of congressional investigations.
Certain prominent figures of the time, such as former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden himself, are also targeted.
Several officials in the current Trump administration, such as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have lashed out at the former Democratic leader’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, deeming the various measures taken over the years to combat the virus to be ineffective.
