By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (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)
