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Title: Trump-Branded 'Lab Leak' Page Replaces US Covid Information Sites

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/19/0302...

"There has never been a consensus or a 'smoking gun' to explain what started
the pandemic," writes ABC News. Yet the Associated Press reports that "A
federal website that used to feature information on vaccines, testing and
treatment for COVID-19 has been transformed into a page supporting the theory
that the pandemic originated with a lab leak." (This despite the fact that
"about 325 Americans have died from COVID per week on average over the past
four weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention." The covid.gov website shows a photo of President Donald Trump
walking between the words "lab" and "leak" under a White House heading... The
web page also accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of pushing a "preferred
narrative" that COVID-19 originated in nature. The origins of COVID have
never been proven. Scientists are unsure whether the virus jumped from an
animal, as many other viruses have, or came from a laboratory accident. A
U.S. intelligence analysis released in 2023 said there is insufficient
evidence to prove either theory. "Many scientists think it's more likely the
virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people
in a wildlife market located in Wuhan," reports NPR. And even Jamie Metzl, a
critic of the wildlife spillover theory, told NPR that while they appreciated
"efforts to dig deeper... it would be a terrible shame if such efforts
distracted from essential work to help prevent further infections and treat
people suffering from COVID-19 and long COVID." (The federal website
covidtests.gov now also redirects instead to the new page...) Some scientists
were critical of the new site, which they say appears political in intent.
"Every one of the five pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis
... is factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way,"
[wrote Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in
Canada]. "But making evidence-based arguments in good faith about the
pandemic's origin is not the purpose of this document. This is pure
propaganda, intended to justify the systematic devastation of the federal
government, particularly programs devoted to public health and biomedical
research," Rasmussen added. Other scientists said the web site doesn't follow
the existing body of scientific evidence on the issue. That evidence does not
support "any of the many, often contradictory, lab leak scenarios that have
been proposed," Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University
of Arizona, in an email to NPR. He argued that the evidence is consistent
with "the less flashy hypothesis that bringing live animals infected with
pathogens with pandemic potential into the heart of one of the biggest cities
in the world was how this pandemic started.... the next pathogen with
pandemic potential will find us easy pickings if we don't appreciate how
risky this sort of 'biosafety level zero' activity is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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