The Trump administration attempts to correct the record on Covid

Last Friday the White House launched, without warning (which is how they like to do things), what is essentially a truth and reconciliation inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. While this somewhat vanished into the fog of President Trump’s ongoing battles against the post-Cold War liberal order, it’s still a significant political event. 

Dial your browser to covid.gov, and it takes you to a White House splash page, with the words LAB LEAK in all caps, and “The True Origins of COVID-19” below to the right. The letters “Covid-19” are in cursive, as though a baseball player had signed it as an autograph. A very serious-looking Donald Trump, wearing a very serious blue suit, strides between the words “LAB” and “LEAK”, as if to say, “I’m comin’ to get you, Dr. Fauci.” 

Given that Trump was in office when Covid appeared, and that he presided over the chaotic first eight months or so of the response to the pandemic, this inquiry carries with it a whiff of O.J. Simpson saying he’s going to find the real killer. That said, Trump did try to change course when it became clear that Anthony Fauci was mad with power and self-promotion. Trump brought in Covid policy skeptic Dr. Scott Atlas into the White House to try and mute some of the pandemic response excesses. It was too little, too late – but there was at least some attempt to take responsibility for the manmade disaster. 

This current initiative, while highly political in nature and loaded with Trumpian bombast, continues that self-reflection and inquiry. It’s something that certainly wouldn’t have happened if Kamala Harris had won last November. 

The vast majority of the website’s content pertains to the most significant part of the Covid story: the origin of the virus and the subsequent attempts to mask and cover up that origin. By now, most credible people have rejected the “wet market” hypothesis. The virus contains biological characteristics not found in nature. And the Wuhan, China, virology lab was conducting gain-of-function research into a Covid-like virus in 2019 when researchers began to fall ill. 

This is where the politics kick in. An organization called EcoHealth Alliance, Inc., funded in part by a grant from Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health, was conducting the research in Wuhan. Fauci and his NIH associates, with assistance from the Biden-era Department of Health and Human Services, then embarked on a multi-year campaign of dissembling and obstruction as Congress attempted to research the virus’s origins, and the US government’s role in abetting Covid’s creation.

The Trump administration has no such loyalties, and has made exposing the above truth about Covid-19 a significant plank in its agenda. The website also includes paragraphs debunking the efficacy of social distancing, mask mandates and lockdowns as pandemic control measures, arguing that these were essentially fear tactics deployed to keep a terrified US (and world) populace from asking questions about the origins of this generationally-transforming public-health event. 

“Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life,” the website says. This feels like basic sanity, but it was considered anathema, even misinformation, to say such things a few years ago. 

The website largely draws upon the findings of the bipartisan Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which wrapped things up in December 2024, more than a month before Trump’s inauguration (and Biden’s preemptive pardon for Dr. Fauci). Given the restrictive intellectual environment surrounding Covid response and police – even on social media, as recently as four years ago – it’s astonishing that the following language could appear on an official government document: 

Public health officials often mislead [sic?] the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions and a lack of transparency. Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored tropes, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions. 

When those efforts failed, the Biden administration resorted to “outright censorship – coercing and colluding with the world’s largest social media companies to censor all COVID-19-related dissent.’” 

With eminently sane and thoroughly respected Fauci critic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya now in charge of the NIH, the Covid.org website is putting out a “never again” vibe. There may be another pandemic, but this is a potentially serious attempt to put to rest the climate of fear and the fog of war that consumed the world during Covid.