Featured Image Credit: Kevin Dietsch/Getty
Topics: Donald Trump, Health, Politics, US News, Coronavirus
Britt Jones
Topics: Donald Trump, Health, Politics, US News, Coronavirus
The White House has officially changed its COVID.gov website to a new page which claims that it knows the origin of the outbreak.
The pandemic began five years ago, and it’s something that we can all attest changed our lives forever.
It was a long period of time which meant that we couldn’t see our friends, families, be there in moments of mourning, birthing and community.
Many lives were lost over the course of the years, after the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly and globally just months after it was first reported in China in 2019.
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Of course, a lot of people have debated its origin.
Was it a man-made product, a bioweapon, an accidental leak or something that occurred in animals naturally and was passed to humans, like bird flu and mad cow disease?
These questions caused a lot of discourse during the pandemic, with the US government largely dismissing the idea that it came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Instead others looked into the wet market within the same area, which saw species like bats, insects and cultural foods at the Huanan seafood market slated by angry citizens.
However, a study conducted by the University of Oxford found that bats were not being sold in the market prior to its closure when the outbreak began.
So, what does the Donald Trump’s gov think about it now?
Well, their new landing page is called ‘Lab Leak: True Origins of COVID-19’, which makes a five-point argument which supports a theory that COVID-19 originated from lab leak in Wuhan.
This theory stemmed from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic report which was released in December 2024.
Prior to the page change, the COVID.gov site originally listed testing, vaccination and treatment information, as well as resources about Long COVID.
Now, it has a five-part list which states ‘evidence’ by the White House on how the pandemic came it be.
It reads: "The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
"Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
"Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels.
"Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
"By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t."
The page also claims that government officials, such as former NIAID Director Dr Anthony Fauci, edited a research paper on the origins of COVID-19 - published in 2020 - that pointed towards the virus being a naturally occurring disease.
However, the authors of the report and Fauci have dismissed the allegations.
In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence unveiled a declassified report on what the intelligence community believed the origin was, and this pointed to a natural spillover.
But then a declassified report released in 2023 shared that a lot of the intelligence community was split on this, with US agencies agreeing that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon.