The Trump administration recently debuted a new look for the official COVID-19 page on the White House website. The headline, complete with superimposed full-body photo of POTUS himself, loudly trumpets the so-called lab leak theory as “the true origins of COVID-19”. However, there is no consensus on the origins of COVID-19 as yet, and framing it as if there is is concerning.
If you’d visited the URL covid.gov just a few short days ago, you’d have been met with a page of useful advice and information, pointing US citizens towards vaccines, treatments, and testing for COVID-19, along with updates on ongoing research into long COVID.
As of Friday, April 18 (and still at time of writing), that same URL redirects to a new, graphics-heavy page positioning the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a Wuhan virological research lab as the undisputed cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Watchers of the official White House media accounts won’t have failed to spot something of a shift in tone since President Trump resumed office, and that was again in evidence in their announcement of the revamped webpage.
Thinking this makeover must have been prompted by some new evidence, a long-sought smoking gun that finally illuminates, once and for all, the origins of the virus, is understandable. But that is not the case, leading the government to make wildly inappropriate statements that seek to establish a much-contested theory as plain, evidential truth despite a lack of scientific evidence.
Where the White House is getting its information
According to the page, the information it contains was sourced from the report produced by the House Oversight Committee, a “Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability in the US House of Representatives.”
That’s a bit of a mouthful, but in a nutshell, this was a bipartisan group of members of the US House of Representatives who were tasked in 2020 with overseeing the then-Trump administration’s handling of the unfolding COVID crisis.
That purpose was changed in 2023, after the House had shifted to a Republican majority, to instead investigate the origins of the virus, including government funding of “gain-of-function research” – more on that later.
The Committee, by this time chaired by Ohio 2nd District Representative Brad Wenstrup, produced its final report in December 2024. The 500-plus-page document is linked in full on the rebranded White House site.
The treatise begins with five key points from the conclusions of that report. It also opens with the assertion that a widely referenced paper from very early in the pandemic “was prompted by Dr Fauci [Dr Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated naturally.”
The framing of Fauci as one of the villains of the piece – not without precedent from this administration – is repeated further down the page with animated graphics referring to the Executive Grant of Clemency enacted upon him by the outgoing President Biden.
The rest of the page is a list of documents, events, and individuals mentioned in the House Committee report. At every turn, moves by the Biden administration are roundly criticized. Any allusion to the initial handling of COVID-19 by the Trump administration, which was in power for most of the first year of the pandemic, remains conspicuously absent.
In other words, the webpage makes no secret of the partisan way in which it is presenting its arguments. It lists various findings from the House Committee’s report, such as:
“The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.”
“There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19.”
“[The] federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives”.
Each of these the page presents as incontrovertible fact. It’s not for us to go through the whole report line by line; these were the conclusions the committee reached based on their investigations and conversations with numerous parties involved.
What we can do, however, is point out that few if any of these questions are settled. There’s a lot of evidence, for example, that masks do help stop the spread of COVID, and that earlier recognition of the role of airborne transmission might have saved lives.
The federal government did counsel against alternative treatments for COVID-19, but for the most high-profile examples, these treatments have now been demonstrated to be ineffective at best, and actively harmful at worst.
The virus does have a feature that makes it unique among other viruses of its classification: a furin cleavage site. That could indicate a lab origin, but it’s also not impossible – as scientists have pointed out – that it arose naturally in only this virus. Lest we forget, nature is full of weirdoes.
But as to the central thesis, just how does the lab leak theory itself stand up to scrutiny?
COVID-19 lab leak: the evidence
The lab leak is one of the two major COVID-19 origin theories that are still on the table. The vast majority of people fall into one of two camps: either the virus spilled over into the human population from an animal host, or it leaked from a scientific facility that had been conducting research on SARS-like coronaviruses.
Here we have to address the contention around gain-of-function research. This term refers to scientific experiments in which mutations are introduced into viruses that enhance a desired function. For pathogenic viruses, this could mean making the virus replicate faster or infect human cells more readily. The opposite is loss-of-function research.
You can see why taking an already potentially dangerous virus and deliberately making it more harmful is not something that should be undertaken lightly; however, these types of experiments are considered a fundamental part of virological research, helping increase our understanding of future pandemic threats.
Clearly such research should be undertaken under strict security measures, and it is – but it’s an uncomfortable truth that lab leaks can and do happen.
SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, China. That much, everyone agrees on. The likeliest epicenters of both competing theories are fewer than 10 miles apart, as a pulsating graphic on the White House site points out.
Research published as recently as 2024 found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in samples collected from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan in 2020. A number of plausible intermediate animal host species, including raccoon dogs and masked palm civets, were housed in cages that swabbed positive for the virus. There’s a huge precedent for viral diseases entering the human population in this way, from the original SARS to Ebola.
As one 2023 paper pointed out, “SARS-CoV-2 is the ninth documented coronavirus to enter the human population.”
That paper went on to say, based on an appraisal of various strands of evidence for and against the two hypotheses, that “the two plausible possibilities for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 are not equally likely.” The evidence included the fact that many of the earliest cases were in people with known connections to the Huanan market, and the lack of evidence of “tampering” in the genetic sequences of early viral strains that might indicate genetic engineering in a lab.
The authors therefore concluded – and other scientists agree – that an animal origin is more likely.
That’s not to say there’s absolutely no evidence for the other side. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of a number of institutions where people were conducting research into coronaviruses prior to 2020. It is at least plausible that, were a COVID-like virus among them – a suggestion that has been denied – a lab leak could have occurred that sparked a pandemic.
The CIA concluded in a recently declassified report that it believes the lab leak theory to be “most likely”, although it admits to having “low confidence” in the conclusion.
The splashy new webpage from the White House is not based on any more evidence than the CIA’s more muted conclusion. The House Committee report on which it is based also concluded that the lab leak hypothesis was “likely”, but not definitive. This puts the framing of the question as “resolved” as unwarranted and ultimately irresponsible.
It may be an uncomfortable truth, but we don’t know for certain where COVID-19 came from, and we may never know.
In US criminal cases, juries are instructed that they must only put forward a guilty verdict if they’re convinced “beyond a reasonable doubt”. In the minds of most experts, there’s still a considerable amount of reasonable doubt surrounding the origins of COVID-19.
Source Link: White House Goes All-In On COVID-19 Lab Leak Origin Theory Despite No Consensus