The White House has identified a laboratory leak in Wuhan as the origin of Covid-19, resting its case on two claims about the virus itself.
The first is that SARS-CoV-2 carries a biological characteristic not found in nature, the furin cleavage site that helps it enter cells. No other known SARS-related coronavirus has one, though the feature appears in more distant relatives.
The second is that every case descends from a single jump into humans, unlike earlier pandemics caused by repeated spillovers from animals. The most cited study on the question, published in Science in 2022, found two separate introductions, and its authors read that as evidence of an animal origin.
Neither an infected intermediate animal nor a laboratory progenitor virus has ever been identified. Wuhan hosts China’s foremost SARS research facility, where staff fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the autumn of 2019.
The bulk of the page concerns conduct rather than biology. It draws on the final report of the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, published in December 2024.
That inquiry found that EcoHealth Alliance breached the terms of its federal grant and that its president provided false statements to Congress. It found that a senior adviser to Fauci unlawfully deleted federal records and that the health department obstructed the investigation for years.
The page also states that the World Health Organisation “caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party”. Its own scientific advisory group said in 2025 that the origins remain inconclusive because Beijing has not supplied the data requested of it.
Fauci declined more than 100 times to answer senators on July 29, invoking his right against self-incrimination. Committee chairman Rand Paul said he would seek a vote on holding him in contempt of Congress.
Brussels has stayed out of the argument. Answering a written question from German MEP Christine Anderson in 2025, Research Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva said no national or European authority had passed the Commission intelligence indicating a laboratory origin.
Germany’s foreign intelligence service had concluded in 2020 that an accidental leak was highly probable, according to reporting in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. That assessment was never made public.
The same Commission reply confirmed that the EU had funded institutions engaged in high-risk virological work before the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology among them. Earlier parliamentary answers put those grants at €73,375 in 2015 and €88,436 in 2019.
