COVID lab leak denial lingers on NIH’s website: ‘Misleading and false’

Allegations that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak were strongly and swiftly denied by the former Biden administration and some prominent health officials, despite dissenting opinions within the medical field, including from Jay Bhattacharya, who now serves as President Donald Trump’s National Institutes of Health director.

‘I’m convinced that research agenda led to this pandemic through a lab leak in China, in Wuhan.’

A page on the NIH’s website, last reviewed by the agency on March 16, 2022, has not yet been updated by the new administration, still claiming that the leak theory is “misleading and false.”

The NIH webpage reads:

Unfortunately, because the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 have not yet been identified, misleading and false allegations have been made about NIAID-supported research on naturally occurring bat coronaviruses. Specifically, these allegations have targeted research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, funded through a subaward from NIAID grantee EcoHealth Alliance. The naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied through this subaward were significantly, genetically different from SARS-CoV-2 and, therefore, could not have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bhattacharya was one of the voices amid the COVID-era insisting that there was a cover-up of the virus’ origins.

In a May interview with Politico, Bhattacharya stated that he believes the U.S. should do more to reveal the origins of the virus, but noted that China has not been cooperating with those investigations.

“There’s enough evidence that I’ve seen from the outside that suggests that there was at the very least a cover-up of dangerous experiments that were done in China with — by the way — the help of the U.S. and also Germany and the U.K.,” Bhattacharya told the news outlet.

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  Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images

He referred to the experiments as “a very, very dangerous kind of utopian research agenda.”

“I’m convinced that research agenda led to this pandemic through a lab leak in China, in Wuhan,” Bhattacharya continued. “But that was a global effort.”

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  Photo by ALLISON BAILEY/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

He called it “absolutely striking” that then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci and other leaders would invest so much effort into suppressing the theory and “denigrating scientists who very legitimately raised this possibility.”

Blaze News contacted the NIH to determine whether it is aware of the webpage dismissing lab leak claims and if it plans to update its website. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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