Perhaps my friends, running an authoritarian government based on enforced unreality and fascist conspiracy theories is actually *not* a very good idea? A US government website that used to post Covid information has been edited to promote the lab leak theory and prosecute reactionary anti-vaxer grievances about former Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/18/trump-covid-website-lab-leak
Trump White House replaces Covid website with treatise on ‘lab leak’ theory
"The Trump administration has replaced Covid.gov – a website that once provided Americans with access to information about free tests, vaccines, treatment and secondary conditions such as long Covid – with a treatise on the “lab leak” theory.
The site includes intense criticism of Dr Anthony Fauci, who helmed national Covid policies under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the World Health Organization (WHO) and state leadership in New York."
Look, I don't do hagiography here and I'm not going to pretend that ignoring Covid and just letting people die wasn't eventually a bipartisan position in American politics. But for the Trump regime to replace one of the few supports for the public that the government was bothering to offer with some winger conspiracy nonsense about the lab leak theory and two minutes of hate about Fauci is both disgusting, and definitely a kind of fascist propaganda operation designed to generate an enforced unreality. If the truth be told, I'm not even a huge fan of Dr. Fauci's work as a public health official, but I can absolutely fucking guarantee you these nazis aren't upset over a general failure by the US government and health apparatus to respond adequately to the AIDS/HIV crisis or the decision to pretend Covid is over and send everyone back to work in a still quite deadly pandemic. The fascist American right literally wants to hang that guy because he made them take a vaccine, full stop.
As for the so-called "lab leak" theory, I think the Guardian is being far too generous. Every scientist or medical observer I've ever talked to or heard speak about the origins of Covid has said the only reason to believe the lab leak conspiracy is because it cannot be absolutely disproven as it's hard to prove a negative, but the vast and overwhelming body of evidence points to a zoogenic or spillover origin. For the White House to take down a useful anti-Covid resource and replace it with a conspiracy theory only relevant because "you can't prove it's *not* true beyond a shadow of a doubt" is both irresponsible, and ideologically revealing.
And to what end? Well promoting this conspiracy theory, and discrediting a medical establishment that disagrees with everything your HHS secretary is trying to push as public policy, has value to the Trump regime. This is an administration that absorbed the reactionary anti-vax conspiracy movement into its base years ago, and rode that base to what Trump clearly considers absolute power; Trump already put a guy who thinks vaccines cause autism in charge of the entire American state health apparatus. They're anti-science, and pro private medical care, even if that "care" comes from discredited quacks or unlicensed personnel. Furthermore, Trump is currently in the middle of a trade war with China that he's characterizing as an existential struggle for the survival of America and the lab these crackpots claim leaked Covid into the world is located in Wuhan, China.
And in the end, that's why it doesn't matter if the regime is right about the lab leak theory; they most certainly aren't, but the fact is that promoting these ideas as official government positions was never about right or wrong in the first place. The Trump administration is governing by fascist conspiracy theory because those reactionary conspiracies further their reactionary goals. The truth was never, and will never be a factor in these decisions.
