Trump launches new Covid website - and blames China lab leak for causing pandemic amid intensifying diplomatic war
Donald Trump intensified his diplomatic war with China yesterday by setting out in detail why the US government believes the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
The White House unveiled a new Covid-19 website – with a full-length image of President Trump and the banner 'The True Origins Of Covid-19 – which pointed the finger at Beijing and previous US administration figures for promoting the false claim that the pandemic started naturally in an animal market.
The website said: 'Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before Covid-19 was discovered in the animal market.
'The federal government demonised alternative treatments and disavowed narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful attempt to coerce and control the health decisions of the American people'.
Noting the 'virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature', the website concludes: 'By nearly all measures of science, if there were evidence of a natural origin, it would have already surfaced. But it hasn't.'
The White House also describes the response to the pandemic by the World Health Organisation as 'an abject failure' for caving to 'pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placing China's political interests ahead of its international duties'.
This follows the CIA declaring in January that the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab than from nature.
And it comes amid a deepening trade war between Washington and Beijing after Mr Trump slapped tariffs up to 145 per cent on imports from China.
Donald Trump intensified his diplomatic war with China yesterday by setting out in detail why the US government believes the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory
This follows the CIA declaring in January that the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab than from nature
A new website unveiled by The White House read: 'Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before Covid-19 was discovered in the animal market'
Earlier this year, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a former spy chief had sent a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic saying the virus originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility. But Lord Vallance, now a science minister who was the Government's chief scientific adviser at the time, is said by sources to have ignored the report, possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding.
The dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020.
It stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in Wuhan Institute of Virology.' It said Beijing was pushing a fake narrative that the virus originated in an animal market.
The dossier, compiled by eminent academics and intelligence experts and seen by The Mail on Sunday, said China retrospectively manipulated viral samples to give credence to the deception.
Earlier this year, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a former spy chief had sent a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic saying the virus originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility
![A source close to Mr Johnson said: 'Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid'](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/04/19/22/97471623-14628533-image-a-19_1745096499644.jpg)
A source close to Mr Johnson said: 'Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid'
A source close to Mr Johnson said: 'Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid. It struck him as too much of a coincidence that a mutant Covid virus appeared in a city that just happened to possess one of the only labs in the world that engineered mutant Covid viruses.
'He was very struck by the refusal of the scientists, especially Patrick Vallance, even to contemplate this possibility. He asked again after getting the Dearlove briefing, and again the agencies came back with the same answer and rubbished Dearlove.'
In April 2020, this newspaper revealed that the Government's secret Cobra committee had been told that Covid had leaked from a laboratory, only for this to then be dismissed as a 'conspiracy theory'.
In response to the White House, China yesterday accused Mr Trump of politicising the issue and said that there was no credibility to claims that a laboratory leak caused the pandemic.
