White House website backs theory COVID-19 came from lab

The White House has posted a new page on the origins of the coronavirus on its official website in which it supports the theory that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory.

The covid.gov website, which redirects to a page on the White House website, displays the title "Lab Leak" in large letters.

Between the two words stands a determined-looking US President Donald Trump.

Under the title is written: "The true origins of COVID-19."

The page accuses the media, politicians, health authorities and US immunologist Anthony Fauci of pushing a "preferred narrative" that COVID-19 originated in nature.

It mentions that Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus was first detected as spreading, is home to a research lab with a history of conducting virus research with "inadequate biosafety levels".

The federal government website used to feature information on vaccines, testing and treatment for COVID-19.

More than five years after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, it is still unclear whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or originated in a laboratory in China.

The website also criticises the most important rules from the coronavirus period - such as physical distancing, the wearing of masks and lockdowns - as wrong.

In January, one of the first acts of the new director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe, was to change his agency's assessment of the origin of the coronavirus, positing that it was likely a laboratory accident.

The CIA assesses that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin.

At the beginning of December, a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives had already presented a report supporting the laboratory theory.

Lothar Wieler, the former president of Germany's Robert Koch Institute also considers the laboratory theory to be more likely, he recently told the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The RKI monitors diseases and public health in Germany.

China's government says it supports and has taken part in research to determine COVID-19's origin, and has accused the United States and other countries of politicising the matter.

Chinese authorities have insisted there is no credibility to claims that a laboratory leak likely caused the pandemic.

with AP and Reuters