White House blames Covid 'lab leak' origins on China, slams Biden and Fauci

Washington, April 19 (IANS) US President Donald Trump's White House launched a Covid-19 website on Friday in which it blamed the origins of the coronavirus on a lab leak in China's Wuhan.

He also criticised former President Joe Biden, former top US health official Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organisation of suppressing the coronavirus origins.

The White House website now has an entire page dedicated to the Covid-19 lab-leak theory.

This comes weeks after the CIA issued a report saying that the lab-leak was likely.

The agency had previously said that it did not have enough information to determine the origin of Covid-19.

The new webpage is on the site that served as a resource for Covid-19 vaccination efforts. It now has a banner reading: "LAB LEAK, The True Origins of Covid-19."

President Donald Trump is also featured in the banner.

The 'lab-leak' page also accuses former Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Fauci and Biden of covering up the origins of coronavirus.

It says that the previous administration 'engaged in a multi-year campaign of delay, confusion and non-responsiveness' to conceal the truth.

"This website shows the true origins of Covid-19 and how Democrats and the media discredited alternative health treatments and the lab-leak theory," the White House said in a statement.

"The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 publication, which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab-leak theory, was promoted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that Covid-19 originated naturally," the site said.

It further lists five key points, suggesting that Covid-19's origins were not natural.

1. The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.

2. According to the data, all cases of Covid-19 stem from a single introduction into humans, which is contrary to previous pandemics, where there were multiple spillover events.

3. 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) without adequate biosafety.

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

5. By nearly all measures of science, any evidence suggesting a natural origin of coronavirus would have already surfaced. But it hasn't.

--IANS

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