Trump on Covid Lab Leak

Source: Trump on Covid Lab Leak
Publisher: Michael’s Substack (Free) | Author: Michael Weissman
Published: April 20, 2025 | Archived: July 17, 2026

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The Trump gang has just replaced the covid.gov website with a declaration that Covid came from a lab leak, along with a rudimentary argument and a collection of politicized comments. No detailed evidence is included. A misleading claim about the lack of efficacy of masks was tossed in for bad measure. The New York Times (representing, I think, most of the liberal commentariat) has responded with a long article denouncing the whole idea as an unsupported conspiracy theory.

This foreseeable conjunction is approximately the worst possible outcome, one that I’ve spent a lot of the last two years trying to help head off. It combines a loss of useful public health information, a misleading claim about public health measures, and a failure to provide any actual further information on origins. Much of the scientific community and nominal friends of science have seized the opportunity to respond with some combination of dishonesty and dim-witted authoritarianism, as if the overwhelming majority of the population had not already rejected their story. We’re left with an increasingly openly fascist administration telling a crude approximation of the truth (and being believed by most of the population) while most of the scientific establishment in the U.S. and their followers push nonsense. (In contrast, the French establishment, i.e. the National Academy of Medicine, recently adopted a report making it clear that the current evidence is more supportive of a lab leak than of zoonosis.)

Here I’ll try to go over at least an evaluation of the key points of the announcement concerning Covid origins. Each point on the origins is followed by my evaluation. The supporting material for these comments is in my long blog on the origins. (“Trump” here means the current administration, not the illiterate person.)

1. Trump: “The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.”

This is exaggerated. The furin cleavage site (FCS) is found in nature though not in other sarbecoviruses. Given selection constraints, i.e. that having the FCS makes it much more likely that we would notice the virus because it causes a pandemic, the presence of an FCS provides only weak evidence for a lab leak.

2. Trump: “Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.”

The data do show that a single successful spillover is more probable. We fortunately don’t have enough cases of new pandemics to say that the probable single spillover is strong evidence against natural zoonosis, although it certainly looks atypical and thus provides weak evidence for a lab leak.

3. Trump: “Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels.”

This one is true. It’s somewhat understated since it could be substantially strengthened by description of the known research plans of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), based on grant proposals.

4. Trump: “Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.”

Perhaps there’s some classified information that makes this claim useful, but based on the unclassified information it isn’t. We have no idea if there’s meaningful evidence that whatever illnesses happened were Covid.

5. Trump: ”By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t*.”*

That’s unspecific and oddly phrased but essentially true. The absence of any detected prior hosts, the lack of cases among wildlife vendors, the negative correlation between potential host mtDNA and SC2 RNA on market swabs, and the lack of normal post-species-spillover rapid evolution of the amino acid sequence add up to providing significant evidence against natural zoonosis and thus supporting a lab leak.

Several other lines of evidence, especially the close resemblance of the restriction enzyme segment pattern to the prior WIV plans for making synthetic chimeras, also support a lab-leak picture.

The site goes on to make a series of charges against various institutions for their failures to respond effectively to Covid and especially for their general dishonesty. The idea is supposed to be that it was all the Democrats fault. The problem with these claims is what they omit.

For the first year after the pandemic started, the President was Donald Trump. Trump is the one who undid Obama’s nominal ban on dangerous gain-of-function work in 2017. Trump is the one who led the origins coverup for about a year, boasting of the great trade deal he was getting with Xi Jinping as he praised how well Xi handled the situation. Trump tried to shut down testing to hide the evidence that the pandemic was spreading. He assured us that the pandemic would be over by April 2020. He repeatedly advised taking ineffective drugs, and suggested looking into injecting bleach or pushing UV lamps up our butts. Meanwhile, when Trump got sick he took real drugs- Remdesivir and a new monoclonal antibody that was not available to the public.

The most important claim for practical purposes on the new site is “There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19.” That is technically true but seriously misleading. It’s hard to gather “conclusive evidence” without large randomized trials. Well-fitted N95 masks do an excellent job of blocking aerosol transmission, which is why they are used by infectious disease doctors. The experiment of providing good-quality masks with good advice on how and when to use them was simply never tried. Trump never used the Defense Production Act to make good masks available.

The most obvious cost-effective method to reduce the disease burden while allowing most normal activities to resume was and remains to install air purifiers and/or UV-C lamps in public spaces including all medical facilities, schools, airports, etc. Trump did nothing along those lines. Although he told Bob Woodward (on tape) that he knew Covid was airborne, he didn’t bother to tell the public. Biden didn’t do much better.

We now have an administration whose health policy is led by the lunatic RFK jr, who cannot bring himself to acknowledge that AIDS is caused by HIV or that a vaccine is the reason that measles is almost gone. The NIH is now headed by the well-spoken ideologue economist Jay Bhattacharya, who opposes almost all public health measures. My colleagues who think that Bhattacharya will be an important voice for sanity seem to have forgotten that he spoke at a rally for RFK when RFK was a fringe candidate.

We’re paying for the cowardly silence of most scientists by handing something like truth-telling on the big question of Covid origins over to the fascists, for reasons on which I’ve speculated. Overall the scientific community (outside France) has failed to present a realistic picture of the evidence on Covid origins, for a variety of reasons on which I’ve briefly speculated. That failure has allowed the fascists to take on the role of truth-tellers, after their own crude fashion. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it “Fewer own goals would be a good idea just about now. But if a few outspoken people once again pretend to speak for “Science” and thus cause even more public trust to be lost, it would be a predictable but tragic continuation of the last few years.”

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