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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
9 minutes ago
- Yahoo
DeepSeek, Trump's Plan Steer Agenda at China's Top AI Forum
(Bloomberg) -- Star founders, Beijing officials and deep-pocketed financiers converge on Shanghai by the thousands this weekend to attend China's most important AI summit. At the top of the agenda: how to propel Beijing's ambitions to leapfrog the US in artificial intelligence — and profit off that drive. Trump Awards $1.26 Billion Contract to Build Biggest Immigrant Detention Center in US The High Costs of Trump's 'Big Beautiful' New Car Loan Deduction Can This Bridge Ease the Troubled US-Canadian Relationship? Salt Lake City Turns Winter Olympic Bid Into Statewide Bond Boom The World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which has featured Elon Musk and Jack Ma in years past, was devised to showcase the cutting-edge of Chinese technology. This year's attendance may hit a record as it's taking place at a critical juncture in the US-Chinese tech rivalry. This week, US President Donald Trump unveiled his so-called AI Action Plan — a sort of call to arms to ensure the country keeps its lead in the post-ChatGPT epoch. At the same time, the emergence of DeepSeek in January galvanized a generation of Chinese developers to ride a nationwide investment and innovation wave. From Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to fledgling firms such as Minimax, the country's aspirants in the field have since moved aggressively to try and close the gap with the likes of OpenAI and Google. 'While many recognize DeepSeek's achievements, this represents just the beginning of China's AI innovation wave,' said Louis Liang, an AI sector investor with Ameba Capital. 'We are witnessing the advent of AI mass adoption, this goes beyond national competition.' The Shanghai conference rundown for now remains largely unknown — as it has in years past just days before kickoff. Chinese Premier Li Qiang will attend, and tech leaders from Tencent Holdings Ltd. to ByteDance Ltd. and startups like Zhipu AI and Moonshot are likely to turn out in force. Here's what we can expect from the summit starting Saturday. DeepSeek's Aura Neither the startup nor its reclusive founder Liang Wenfeng feature in the advance literature for the event. And yet, the two-year-old firm is likely to be one of the topics du jour. Since its low-cost, high-performance AI model humbled much of Silicon Valley, the industry has watched China closely for another seismic moment. In a field notorious for splashing billions of dollars on Nvidia Corp. chips and data centers, DeepSeek's no-frills approach inspired a re-think of traditional models. And it challenged what till then was unquestioned US supremacy in bleeding-edge technology: Xi Jinping himself turned out in public in February to congratulate Liang and his fellow tech entrepreneurs. China craves another big breakthrough. Downloads and usage of DeepSeek models have slowed, as has the pace of new model rollouts that peaked over the spring at once every few days. Now, much of the industry talk centers on why DeepSeek's R2 — the followup to its seminal R1 — hasn't yet emerged. Local media have blamed everything from Liang's perfectionist streak to performance glitches. Trump's, and Xi's, Ambitions The conference gets underway days after the US leader signed executive orders to loosen regulations and expand energy supplies for data centers. 'From this day forward, it'll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence,' Trump told executives and lawmakers at a DC event. Among the attendees was Jensen Huang, whose Nvidia is one of the companies at the heart of the global AI movement. Much has been made in Washington of China's seemingly meteoric ascent in AI, with observers saying the country is now perhaps just months behind the US in terms of AI sophistication. That's a wafer-thin margin compared with sectors such as semiconductors, where America is regarded as many years or even generations ahead. Trump's newly announced action plan is likely to spur Chinese companies into accelerating their own plans to go global, in part by aggressively open-sourcing their platforms. Beijing wants AI to become a $100 billion industry by 2030. At the Communist Party's April Politburo study session, Xi emphasized that China must push for breakthroughs in critical areas like high-end chips and AI research. Rise of the Robots Chinese humanoid makers are expected to showcase their most advanced models. Last week, UBTech posted a video of its Walker S2 humanoid walking to a battery station, removing the pack from its back, placing it on the recharge pad before fitting itself with a new battery. While obviously edited and choreographed, it encapsulated the advances that Chinese firms have made in a wide-open field — and their lofty ambitions. Unitree teased a bargain-basement price of under $10,000 for its androids. And just this week, TikTok-owner ByteDance posted a video of its ByteMini robot painstakingly hanging a shirt on a clothes rack — a simple human exercise yet an intricate dance for a machine. They join the likes of AgiBot and UBTech in collectively driving a promising field in which American companies have so far failed to stake out a clear lead, despite decades of effort. The Chinese companies 'are targeting hundreds to thousands of units to be delivered this year, racing to establish the ecosystem,' Morgan Stanley analyst Sheng Wong said in a note this week. Show the Money Venture capitalists and dealmakers will be hunting for emerging tech leaders. And not all of them are Chinese. China's largest venture capital houses are tapping the market for at least $2 billion in new funds. At least six of the country's most prominent VC firms — including Lightspeed China Partners and Monolith Management — are creating dollar-denominated funds designed to allow overseas investors to pool bets on Chinese companies. That's a wave of fundraising that hasn't been seen among Chinese VCs for years. It's unfolding as global investors reassess the country's startup landscape and economy, which are showing signs of revival after years of Covid-era stagnation and regulatory headwinds. Organizers promise a breakout event that will feature startup pitches and live demos for dealmakers. Startups by the hundreds are expected to fill a 70,000 sq-meter exhibition hall, showing off everything from autonomous delivery drones to machines that dispense toilet paper. Missing Global Touch Attendees are unlikely to spot US companies — at least not in major fashion. In 2024, Tesla Inc. popped up with its Cybertruck and Optimus robot. This year's speaker lineup doesn't (yet) include Musk but does list industry pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian scientist who pioneered artificial neural networks. With the US-China tech rivalry accelerating, many American companies remain wary of drawing the spotlight. Still, Beijing is likely to take the opportunity to continue pushing its international agenda. One of the conference centerpieces is a 'High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance' to discuss the challenges in deploying AI responsibly. To many observers, it's also emblematic of China's overarching goal of setting global standards. 'Since 2018, China has used WAIC to stake its claim on global AI technical and political leadership,' said Tom Nunlist, associate director of the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium. 'With the race to AI now neck and neck between the US and China, that play is more compelling than ever.' --With assistance from Vlad Savov. (Updates with video of ByteDance's mini-robot from the 14th paragraph.) Burning Man Is Burning Through Cash Elon Musk's Empire Is Creaking Under the Strain of Elon Musk It's Not Just Tokyo and Kyoto: Tourists Descend on Rural Japan Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea's Wild Remote Worker Scheme A Rebel Army Is Building a Rare-Earth Empire on China's Border ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Fox News
11 minutes ago
- Fox News
Trump is trying to ‘cajole' Powell to lower interest rates: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick discusses how President Donald Trump and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's sparred over renovation costs for the 'Fed Mahal' on 'The Ingraham Angle.'
San Francisco Chronicle
40 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Planned Parenthood closes 5 Northern California clinics, citing Trump budget bill
President Donald Trump's budget cuts to Medicaid have forced Planned Parenthood Mar Monte to shutter five clinics across Northern California and the Central Coast, including one in South San Francisco, the group said Thursday. The GOP-led federal spending bill that Trump signed into law earlier this month eliminated federal Medicaid funding for any type of medical care to organizations that perform abortions. Mar Monte is the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country, with health care centers from Bakersfield, the Bay Area, Stockton and Sacramento. The now-shuttered facilities also include San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Gilroy and Madera. The closures represent the first wave of how the recent federal budget cuts will have real-life consequences for health clinics across the country — particularly for low-income Americans. They are also a crushing blow to a state that set it up to be an abortion haven after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In the year after the decision, political leaders in California — led by Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-controlled Legislature — passed more than a dozen new laws and invested more than $200 million to increase access across the state. Thursday's announcement drives home the extent of the federal government's tremendous power to impact abortion access. Roughly 80% of Mar Monte's patients received Medi-Cal, California's version of Medicaid. Ten million people are expected to lose their health insurance because of nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans will receive a disproportionate share of the tax cuts funded by those cuts, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. In just one week since Mar Monte stopped billing Medicaid, the Planned Parenthood affiliate with 35 locations said it saw 5,000 patients — amounting to about $1.7 million in care costs it covered without reimbursement — Mar Monte Chief of Staff Andrew Adams told the Chronicle Thursday. 'It's just not sustainable,' said Adams. 'We can't keep our doors open if we continue doing that.' Mar Monte said the funding law also forced it to end services in family medicine, behavioral health and prenatal care. The Planned Parenthood affiliate estimates it will lose $100 million in annual revenue from care that can no longer be reimbursed under the law because they provide abortion care. Americans tend to support abortion rights, according to public polling. A May 2025 Gallup Poll found that 51% of respondents described themselves as 'pro choice' while 43% described themselves as 'pro life.'Of those respondents who said they were 'dissatisfied' with the nation's abortion polices, 42% said they would like to see them made 'less strict' while 14% wanted them to be 'stricter.'
