White House replaces Covid resource page with lab leak website

Anyone who tried to access Covid.gov, a federal website once dedicated to Covid resources, found something drastically different in its place Friday.

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. 

Before Friday, Covid.gov was a tool to connect people to information about Covid vaccines, treatment, testing and long Covid. The website also formerly helped people find pharmacies and community health centers that offered Covid tests, medical visits and medications at once.

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Its sister site, Covidtests.gov, allowed people to order free Covid tests to their homes. That now redirects to the White House’s lab leak website as well.

“The Trump administration has been very clear that, in contrast to the previous administration, we WILL be the most transparent administration in U.S. history,” White House spokesman Kaelan Dorr said in a statement. “Nothing will stop us from innovating and finding creative ways to uphold our end of the bargain.” 

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.

The subcommittee was created in 2020, when Democrats had control of the House, to scrutinize the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic. But its focus shifted to investigating the lab leak theory and the value of vaccine and mask mandates in early 2023, once Republicans assumed the House majority. 

House Democrats released their own report in December, claiming the subcommittee “failed to find the virus’s origin or advance our understanding of how the novel coronavirus came to be.” While they acknowledged that a lab leak was possible, they also said the virus may have spilled over from animals to humans, like all other viruses that have caused pandemics in the past.

Both the Republicans’ report and the new White House site claim that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had a role in suppressing the lab leak theory. However, the Democrats’ report deemed that false and accused subcommittee Republicans of lobbing “baseless attacks” on Fauci and other public health professionals.

Fauci voluntarily appeared at multiple subcommittee hearings last year and denied concealing any relevant information about a potential leak. Despite leaving his position at the end of 2022, he has remained the subject of frequent ire from conservatives and supporters of President Donald Trump.

Many independent scientists have said the lab leak theory has a lower likelihood of being true compared with a natural spillover event from animals to humans. That was the consensus of a survey of 168 scientists last year conducted by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Similarly, a 2023 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine determined that “of the three possibilities — natural, accidental, or deliberate — the most scientific evidence yet identified supports natural emergence” of the virus. The authors noted that the issue had become “embroiled in politics” and that the true origin may never be known. 

In 2023, a declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined that both the lab leak and animal origin theories were plausible. However, in January, the CIA said the lab leak was more likely — though the agency noted it had “low confidence” in that judgment.

The Trump administration’s shuttering of Covid.gov comes less than a month after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slashed $11.4 billion in Covid funding, some of which helped state health departments improve their public health infrastructure for future pandemics. The National Institutes of Health also terminated grants for Covid research last month, including a $577 million program for developing oral drugs that could ward off pathogens with pandemic potential.

According to termination letters reviewed by NBC News, the administration broadly justified the cuts by saying “the pandemic is over.”