WASHINGTON, April 18 (Reuters) – Republican U.S. 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 while criticizing Democratic former President Joe Biden, former top U.S. health official Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization.
The website was also critical of steps like social distancing, mask mandates and lockdowns.
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Trump began a 12-month process of withdrawing the U.S. – by far the WHO’s largest financial backer – from the agency when he took office in January.
Fauci, Biden and WHO had no immediate comment.
Soon after taking office, Trump also said that Fauci, who has faced threats since leading the country’s COVID-19 response, should hire his own security and ended U.S. security for him.
A CIA spokesperson said in January that the CIA has assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely to have emerged from a lab than from nature. The CIA had said it had “low confidence” in its assessment and that both scenarios – lab origin and natural origin – remain plausible.
China’s government says it supports and has taken part in research to determine COVID-19’s origin, and has accused Washington of politicizing the matter, especially because of efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate.
Beijing has said there was no credibility to claims that a laboratory leak likely caused the pandemic.
Reporting by Kanishka Singh; Editing by Sandra Maler
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Kanishka Singh is a breaking news reporter for Reuters in Washington DC, who primarily covers US politics and national affairs in his current role. His past breaking news coverage has spanned across a range of topics like the Black Lives Matter movement; the US elections; the 2021 Capitol riots and their follow up probes; the Brexit deal; US-China trade tensions; the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan; the COVID-19 pandemic; and a 2019 Supreme Court verdict on a religious dispute site in his native India.
