2 weeks Ago By Beth Mole
After obliterating the federal office on long COVID and clawing back billions in COVID funding from state health departments, the Trump administration has now entirely erased the online hub for federal COVID-19 resources. In its place now stands a site promoting the unproven idea that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 was generated in and leaked from a lab in China, sparking the global health crisis. Navigating to COVID.
gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats. Previously, the site provided unembellished quick references to COVID-19 resources, including links to information on vaccines, testing, treatments, and long COVID. It also provided a link to resources for addressing COVID-19 vaccine misconceptions and confronting misinformation .
That all appears to be gone now, though some of the same information still remains on a separate COVID-19 page hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . While there remains no definitive answer on how the COVID-19 pandemic began, the scientific data available on the topic points to a spillover event from a live wild animal market in Wuhan, China. The scientific community largely sees this as the most likely scenario, given the data so far and knowledge of how previous outbreak viruses originated, including SARS-CoV-1.
By contrast, the lab origin hypothesis largely relies on the proximity of a research lab to the first cases, conjecture, and distrust of the Chinese government, which has not been forthcoming with information on the early days of the health crisis. Overall, the question of SARS-CoV-2's origin has become extremely politicized, as have most other aspects of the pandemic. While the acute phase of the pandemic has subsided, the virus still circulates continuously globally and kills hundreds of Americans each week.
When the Trump administration pulled critical funding from health departments in March, HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon downplayed the disease, saying in a statement: "The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago." At the same time, the Trump administration has demolished efforts to address long COVID, a condition that has affected millions of Americans. While estimates vary, data from 2022 found that 6.
9 percent of adults and 1.3 percent of children (roughly 17 million and 1 million, respectively) experienced long COVID, according to the CDC . The Trump administration slashed grant funding for research on long COVID , disbanded the Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on long COVID , and shuttered the HHS Office of Long COVID Research and Practice .
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