The New York Times, April 18, 2025 (with Benjamin Mueller)
The Trump administration has replaced the government’s main portal for information about Covid with a website arguing that the coronavirus leaked from a lab, throwing its weight behind a theory of the pandemic’s origins that is so far not backed by direct evidence and that has divided intelligence agencies.
Covid.gov and Covidtests.gov, federal websites that used to deliver information about Covid and allow people to order tests, now redirect to the lab leak web page. Carrying an image of President Trump flanked by the words “Lab Leak,” the new page is illustrated by a satellite image of Wuhan, China, the city where Covid began spreading, and says it will describe “the true origins of Covid-19.”
The website notes that the city is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a coronavirus lab that had been involved with research projects that some scientists considered dangerous. It also alludes to concerns that the lab had conducted its work under improper safety conditions. Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency cited those concerns when the agency recently shifted its position to favor the lab leak hypothesis.
But the page does not address other details about the early spread of the virus, like where patients lived and worked and genetic clues from an illegal wild-animal market in Wuhan where many cases were detected. Many scientists believe that information points to the virus having spilled from animals into people at the market.
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, White House officials have begun describing the lab leak theory as “confirmable truth.” The C.I.A. shifted its assessment with “low confidence”; the agency’s decision was not based on new intelligence, but rather a closer look at evidence about safety conditions in Wuhan labs.
The White House stance masks uncertainty within the ranks of government intelligence agencies about the origins of the pandemic. Intelligence officials and scientists have noted that, since 2020, China has withheld crucial information that could have shed light on the question.
The Energy Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have favored the idea that a lab leak may have caused the pandemic. Five intelligence bodies considered theories of a non-laboratory origin — that the coronavirus spread among animals in nature, and then jumped to people at the wild-animal market or another location — more likely.
A declassified report from Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2023 said researchers at the Wuhan virology institute probably failed to use sufficient safety measures at least sometimes. But, the report said, intelligence agencies have found nothing that tells them that work at the laboratory caused the pandemic.
That report was released two years after the Biden administration, in 2021, ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate anew the origins of the virus.
Around that same time, mainstream scientists called for an open investigation of the virus’s origins that took seriously the possibility of a lab leak. Some expressed frustration that colleagues earlier in the pandemic had been too quick to dismiss the idea, including experts chosen by the World Health Organization who wrote a report in collaboration with Chinese scientists.
Since then, inquiries by intelligence agencies and congressional investigators have yielded no definitive answers.
Researchers who specialize in tracing outbreaks, including some who joined calls for evenhanded investigations of the origins, also did additional analyses of early cases and viral genomes, including new clues that had emerged from China. Those analyses pointed to the pandemic’s starting at the illegal wild-animal market.
The Trump administration’s purging of the old Covid websites reflects a broader practice of officials recently scrapping health websites that do not align with their views, including ones related to climate change and L.G.B.T.Q. people. (Some of those pages were later restored.)
And it has turned what used to be the government’s main portals for disseminating reliable information about the virus into a vehicle for attacking the administration’s political enemies, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led a federal research institute that awarded funding to a virus-hunting nonprofit that worked with scientists in Wuhan.
While Covid is killing far fewer people than at the height of the pandemic, the United States has continued to record hundreds of Covid deaths each week in recent months.
In addition to arguing for a lab leak, the website condemns the W.H.O. for its decisions during the pandemic, attacks former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York for sending Covid patients to nursing homes, and criticizes measures that were used in efforts to prevent the early spread of the virus, like lockdowns and masking.
The new website’s case for a lab leak contains significant inaccuracies. It begins by saying, of Covid, that “the virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.” That appears to be a reference to the furin cleavage site, a feature that helps the virus get inside cells.
In the very early days of the pandemic, scientists themselves were alarmed by the presence of that feature. But as they studied it more closely, they found that furin cleavage sites are in fact common in other coronaviruses, even if they have not so far been detected in the closest known relatives of the pandemic virus.
Scientists who have scrutinized the furin cleavage site have said it contains many features showing it was not engineered. They have argued, in fact, that constructing a virus in a lab would most likely result in that site being deleted.
The new website also says that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “were sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019,” suggesting that the virus was spreading at the lab before it began infecting people at the wild-animal market.
But the 2023 report from the director of national intelligence complicates that assessment. That report says that “some of the symptoms were not consistent with Covid-19.”
The institute’s workers, the report concludes, “experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with Covid-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to Covid-19.”
That Wuhan held a large coronavirus lab is not a smoking gun, scientists said: A number of large Chinese cities have labs that reported studying viruses like those the Wuhan institute worked on.
Scientific studies of the virus’s origins have found, among other things, that early Covid patients lived around the wild-animal market in a pattern that could not be explained by chance, and that the virus had appeared to spill over from animals into people working or shopping at the wild-animal market on multiple occasions.
That scenario is also consistent, researchers have said, with samples taken from the market that contained the coronavirus along with genetic material belonging to raccoon dogs, which were being sold at the market.
The director of national intelligence has said there was no indication that the Wuhan virology institute had been in possession of the pandemic coronavirus “or a close progenitor” — a virus that could have become the one that caused the pandemic — before the outbreak.
Copyright 2025 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.