When will they arrest Fauci?
The Trump administration recast the White House's COVID information website on Friday to declare a virus leaking from a Chinese lab as the "true origins" of the pandemic.
Why it matters: President Trump has pushed the lab leak theory since 2020 when he downplayed masking, testing and other measures to prevent the spread of COVID during his first term while his approval rating cratered.
Driving the news: "By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced," the White House website said. "But it hasn't."
- Experts say the continued debate over whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or spread after a lab accident distracts from preventing both scenarios from occurring in the future.
Zoom in: The website alleges with no evidence that the Biden administration "engaged in a multi-year campaign of delay, confusion and non-responsiveness" to hide evidence.
Context: The COVID origins debate has featured two theories: that the virus originated naturally from a market in Wuhan, China, or that it came from a lab leak there.
- It also said the World Health Organization's response to the pandemic was an "abject failure because it caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placed China's political interests ahead of its international duties."
- The website criticizes Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for pushing a "preferred narrative."
- Fauci denied suppressing evidence for the lab leak theory during House testimony last year.
- Members of the Biden administration couldn't be immediately reached for comment.
Yes, but: The lab leak theory was initially dismissed by many scientists and U.S. government officials and spread mainly by China critics, including Trump.
- The lack of evidence pointing to a direct transmission route from animals to humans has lead to differing interpretations of the same information.
- And the lab leak theory has been driven, in part, because the Wuhan Institute of Virology had biosafety problems that were chronicled in U.S. government messages, administrative reports an d in academic publications.
- The presence of a mutation known as a "furin cleavage site" on COVID's spike protein has long divided scientists over the question of whether it occurs naturally or was somehow engineered in a lab.


