It’s been five years since COVID-19 first showed up. Wild, right? Feels like a different lifetime. Back then, everything just kind of stopped. No hugs, no parties, no funerals, no hospital visits.
We were stuck, watching the world shift while people got sick and died by the millions. It all started in late 2019, when reports popped up from China. And well… we all know how fast it spread after that.
Trump’s new site makes a bold claim about COVID
So now, the Trump folks have flipped the script. They changed the official COVID.gov page completely.
The new one is called ‘Lab Leak: True Origins of COVID-19’, and yeah, it does exactly what it sounds like. It basically says, “Hey, we know where this thing came from,” and pushes a lab leak theory out of Wuhan.
People have long argued over where it came from
People have been going back and forth on this since the beginning. Like, was it made in a lab? Some secret bioweapon?
Or did it just jump to humans the way other viruses did, like bird flu or mad cow? Everyone had a theory, and it became one of those things folks just couldn’t agree on.
The lab theory wasn’t always taken seriously
Early on, the idea that it leaked from a lab was mostly brushed off by the U.S. government.
Instead, people focused on the wet market nearby — you know, where they sold all kinds of animals, bugs, exotic stuff. That seafood market in Wuhan caught a ton of blame, and folks were pretty vocal about it.
New research raised doubts about the market theory
But later, a study from Oxford threw some cold water on that idea. Turns out, there weren’t even bats being sold at the market before it shut down.
Which, yeah, kind of complicates things.
The five ‘evidence’ points are now front and center
Now the new COVID page from Trump’s team lists five big reasons for believing the lab theory. It says:
“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 government’s public messaging has completely changed
The original site used to be pretty straightforward. Info about vaccines, tests, Long COVID stuff.
Now? That’s all gone. The whole page is focused on this new lab leak theory.
Fauci is being accused of rewriting the science
They also came for Dr. Fauci on the page. It says he and some other officials edited a scientific paper in 2020 — one that leaned toward a natural origin for COVID.
Basically, the site suggests they were trying to steer the story.
Fauci and the authors pushed back on that claim
But yeah, Fauci and the people who wrote the report weren’t having it. They denied the whole thing, said the claims weren’t true.
Intelligence reports have not given a clear answer
Back in 2021, a declassified intelligence report leaned more toward the virus coming from nature.
But by 2023, another report showed that even the intelligence agencies didn’t all agree. Most of them did say one thing clearly though: this wasn’t made as a weapon.
