White House website supports theory that Covid came from a lab
The page, which resembles a Hollywood film poster, 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," with Covid-19 in handwriting.
The page accuses the media, politicians, health authorities and US immunologist Anthony Fauci of spreading the theory that the virus originated naturally.
It also claims that there is much evidence that the virus originated in a laboratory in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.
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 criticizes the most important rules from the coronavirus period - such as social 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 (RKI) also considers the laboratory theory to be more likely, he recently told the Sunday edition of the German broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The RKI monitors diseases and public health in Germany.
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