The Trump administration last week launched a revamped version of the government’s official Covid-19 website. The site is now dedicated exclusively to detailing evidence of the “true origins” of Covid-19, which the White House says escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The website lists five arguments in support of the lab-leak theory:

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has biological characteristics not found in nature.

All Covid-19 cases stem from a single introduction of the virus to humans.

The lab in Wuhan, China, where the virus first appeared, has a history of conducting gain-of-function research with inadequate safety protocols. Researchers at the Wuhan lab were sick with Covid-19 symptoms months before Covid-19 was discovered.

If there were evidence of a natural origin, “it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”

Much of the information on the website was uncovered during a two-year congressional investigation by the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which issued its final report in December 2024.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the question of where the virus originated has been a contentious point of debate. The public health establishment, led by Dr Anthony Fauci, has repeatedly stated the Covid-19 virus came from a wet market in Wuhan.

However, a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, many of which were submitted by the non-profit US Right to Know, revealed collusion among scientists and public health officials to push the “natural origins” theory and to cover up US government funding of risky gain-of-function research.

The substantial amount of evidence that has since been released pointing to a lab-leak origin led the congressional committee, along with the FBI, the US Department of Energy, the Defence Intelligence Agency and the CIA to conclude that the virus most likely escaped from a lab.

Mounting evidence eventually prompted mainstream publications, including The New York Times, Vanity Fair and ProPublica to publish investigations supporting the theory. YouTube medical commentator John Campbell, celebrated the new White House website in a recent episode of his show, saying it offered transparency that hasn’t existed elsewhere.

He quoted some of the early publications supporting the “natural origins” theory, published in Nature Medicine and in The Lancet.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of scientists led by former EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and the Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar, now chief scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), wrote in The Lancet. The statement did not disclose that Daszak was funding coronavirus research led by Shi Zhengli, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Campbell pointed out that at the start of the pandemic, social media posts suggesting the virus originated in a lab were censored. “If you said anything about it, your post would be taken down, videos were taken down for misinformation, disinformation, whichever one it is.”

While concluding that “a lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is the most likely origin of Covid-19,” the website also calls existing government mechanisms for overseeing gain-of-function research “incomplete, severely convoluted,” and lacking “global applicability.”

The site critiques the actions of the WHO during the pandemic. And it criticizes former Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York for sending Covid-19 patients to nursing homes, where many of them subsequently died. It also criticizes government-sanctioned Covid-19 countermeasures, including social distancing, mask mandates and lockdowns.

President Donald Trump is depicted prominently on the website, apparently endorsing its contents. The website does not address Trump’s own role in declaring and extending national lockdowns in 2020.

Mainstream media, including the Times, largely disparaged the site. However, their critiques focused on the website’s style and the fact that the Trump administration had repurposed a general Covid-19 information website.

Mainstream outlets like Reuters and The Associated Press correctly highlighted that the origins of Covid-19 have not been definitively determined. However, they no longer appear to be advocating the natural origins theory.

• A Tell Media report / By Brenda Baletti, a senior reporter for The Defenders