And chock-full of "anti-China" and "anti-science" narratives to boot.
On the heels of the Trump administration declaring that "the pandemic is over" and cutting a whopping $11.4 billion in COVID-19 funding from the CDC and another $577 million from the NIH for research focused on drugs to fight pathogens that could lead to future pandemics, last week, the Trump administration shuttered two federal websites that previously provided resources about COVID-19 and COVID-19 testing. Those websites were replaced with a new site that features a photo of a menacing-looking Donald Trump superimposed over the words "LAB LEAK" in a giant font, with the subheading, "The true origins of COVID-19."
The new website, which is, as Dr. Zachary Rubin states, "highly inaccurate, flawed, and misleading," promotes lab leak conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2 along with huge helpings of anti-Chinese rhetoric. In an informative article in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik sums up the "lab leak theory":
The lab leak theory holds that SARS-2 was created or manipulated into existence in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and escaped from the lab, whether deliberately or by accident.
NBC News provides more details about the new Trump COVID-19 website and the lab leak theory:
The page now redirects to a White House website suggesting that Covid originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, before infecting humans. This much-debated "lab leak theory" emerged in the early days of the pandemic and has since gained popularity among some right-wing media outlets and conservative politicians. . .
The new website's content is largely based on a House of Representatives report released in December, which concluded that COVID "likely emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident." The report was issued by the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which had been probing the virus's origins for about two years.
However, the new Trump website fails to mention that House Democrats released a rebuttal report, in which they argued that the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic "failed to find the virus's origin or advance our understanding of how the novel coronavirus came to be."
In his Los Angeles Times piece, Hiltzik makes it clear that, while the Trump administration is (wrongly) claiming it to be fact, the truth is that the "vast majority" of virologists and epidemiologists don't agree that COVID-19 was leaked from a lab. Instead, they embrace the more likely scenario, the "zoonosis hypothesis"—which states that "the virus reached humans via a spillover from the animal kingdom, probably through the unregulated wildlife trade in Southeast Asia." NBC News cites many of these scientists—for instance, this survey of 168 scientists conducted by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and this 2023 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine—who agree that the origins of COVID-19 are more likely zoonotic than lab-leaked.
The new Trump COVID-19 website also spreads disinformation about Dr. Anthony Fauci's supposed complicity in a lab leak cover-up—nevermind that in their rebuttal report, the House Democrats call this accusation a "baseless attack."
The World Social Web Site also just published an extensive deep-dive debunking of the new Trump COVID-19 website's "five long-discredited lies about COVID-19, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the origins of the pandemic." In that piece, WSWS argues that the political purpose of the website's "anti-China, anti-science narrative" is crystal clear:
The US government seeks to blame Beijing for the global pandemic which has taken 30 million lives, thus providing a pretext for US economic and military warfare against China. And those scientists who played leading roles in fighting the virus and advocating for necessary public health measures are to be targeted as Chinese agents, the "enemy within."
The WSWS provides further commentary on the purpose and consequences of the lab leak narratives being pushed by the Trump administration:
The lab leak narrative's rise marks the convergence of anti-science ideology and geopolitical reaction. By exploiting unverified claims, political figures like Trump and Brad Wenstrup and institutions like the Heritage Foundation have dismantled mechanisms for pandemic accountability, redirected vital resources away from public health infrastructure, and institutionalized distrust in scientific consensus.
The consequences are profound. As the U.S. escalates economic retaliation and scientists face growing hostility, the damage extends well beyond COVID-19. In silencing experts and rewriting the record, the lab leak campaign exposes a dangerous truth: when science becomes a casualty in political warfare, it is public health that suffers most.
Read the full Los Angeles Times piece here, Dr. Zachary Rubin's debunking of the Trump COVID-19 website's claims here, and WSWS's incredibly detailed deep-dive debunking of the new Trump COVID-19 website here, and of the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic's report here.
