INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
After obliterating the federal office on long COVID and clawing back billions in COVID funding from state health departments, the Trump
administration has now entirely erased the online hub for federal COVID-19 resources
In its place now stands a site promoting the unproven idea that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 was generated in and leaked from a lab in
China, sparking the global health crisis.Navigating to COVID.gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and
allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats.Previously, the site
provided unembellished quick references to COVID-19 resources, including links to information on vaccines, testing, treatments, and long
It also provided a link to resources for addressing COVID-19 vaccine misconceptions and confronting misinformation
That all appears to be gone now, though some of the same information still remains on a separate COVID-19 page hosted by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.While there remains no definitive answer on how the COVID-19 pandemic began, the scientific data available on
the topic points to a spillover event from a live wild animal market in Wuhan, China
The scientific community largely sees this as the most likely scenario, given the data so far and knowledge of how previous outbreak viruses
originated, including SARS-CoV-1
By contrast, the lab origin hypothesis largely relies on the proximity of a research lab to the first cases, conjecture, and distrust of the
Chinese government, which has not been forthcoming with information on the early days of the health crisis
Overall, the question of SARS-CoV-2's origin has become extremely politicized, as have most other aspects of the pandemic.
