www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/health/fauci-morens-covid-prosecutions.html
According to the CDC, COVID-19 was the second-leading cause of death among Americans aged 25–44 and the third-leading cause among those aged 45–64 and 65 and older in 2021. Overall, COVID-19 was the third-leading cause of death in the United States that year.
Six years later, the American President’s photograph appears on an official U.S. government website presenting the origin of COVID-19 as a laboratory leak in China.
We deserve more from an American President than a photograph accompanied by an assertion that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak in China. How can we determine whether that causal explanation is better supported than—or refuted in comparison with—a competing zoonotic origin without evaluating the biological and epidemiological evidence under an explicit inferential standard?
The origin of a pandemic that caused mortality on this scale should not be reduced to political assertion. If a laboratory-associated origin is asserted as the causal explanation, that hypothesis should be evaluated under the same scientific inferential standard as a natural zoonotic transmission pathway, with the evidence for each weighed according to its capacity to discriminate between the competing explanations.