Right Wing Celebrates Former Biden COVID Czar’s Embrace of Unproven COVID Origin Story
“It’s going to shift the Overton Window.”
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
At the end of last month, Dr. Ashish Jha, who served as President Biden’s White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator from April 2022 to June 2023, shared a post on X that declared, “I believe the available evidence overwhelmingly points toward a research-related incident in Wuhan as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
”I pretty much agree with everything here,” Jha commented. Later, he appeared on CNN reiterating the message.
The idea that SARS-CoV-2 originally escaped from a Chinese laboratory remains highly speculative with available evidence pointing to the virus having natural origins. Most experts, including the World Health Organization panel tasked with investigating the matter believe that the pathogen spilled over to humans from animals.
The narrative has nonetheless found purchase on the right and with the Trump administration, where it became a vehicle for attacking the president’s perceived enemies. A 2020 GOP strategy memo urged Republicans to embrace the lab leak and accuse their detractors of being soft on China. At the center of the right-wing lab leak narratives has been Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci drew the ire of Trump and his allies back in 2020 for resisting the president’s push to reopen the country early in the pandemic and for rebutting misinformation he promoted about the state of the crisis. The most popular lab leak scenario alleges that Fauci funded the research that created the SARS-CoV-2 virus, tried to cover it up, and lied to Congress about it.
The X post was not the first time Jha had endorsed the lab leak scenario, but it was the most public and explicit. In February last year, he told The Boston Globe that he had “flipped” on the COVID origins question during his time in government, believing at first natural origins to be 80 percent likely when he began his tenure and then coming around to seeing the lab leak as 60 percent likely on his final day.
Months later, he co-founded a biosurveillance firm called BioRadar, which he runs today. The company bills itself as “America’s AI-Powered Biological Intelligence Service.” Its website, which was registered last November, warns that “Engineering pathogens is now fast, cheap, and accessible” and “The world is saturated with high-risk labs.”
Also notable about Jha’s lab leak remark was the timing. Two days earlier, Fauci had answered a subpoena and testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee where he’d been berated and faced conspiratorial accusations from the Republicans members that he had actually been responsible for the coronavirus.
The post Jha shared actually criticized the treatment of the former NIAID director.
Throughout the three-hour affair, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, fearing that anything he said would be used to refer him to the DOJ for prosecution for perjury. Committee Chair Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and other GOP lawmakers have repeatedly expressed a desire to see Fauci prosecuted. Biden, on his last day in office, amid escalating attacks on his former NIAID director, issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci going back a decade. Barring perjury, there appeared to be little the Senate Republicans could do.
The next day, however, Florida’s Republican attorney general launched an investigation into the former top doctor. This week, the Senate committee also voted to hold Fauci in contempt and recommend him to the DOJ for prosecution anyway. Right-wing media has been in a frenzy. The New York Post even published photos from a stake out of Fauci’s home, capturing the doctor “miserably” taking out the trash.
“Grouchy Fauci,” the story opened.
Jha’s remark on the unproven COVID lab leak narrative, which came days before the contempt vote, helped fuel that media frenzy. Right-wing outlets and conspiracy theorists claimed vindication.
“After years of debate, former COVID response coordinator acknowledges pandemic source ‘probably a lab leak,’” read the Fox News headline. “Joe Biden’s COVID Advisor Finally Admitted the Virus Came From a Lab,” declared Townhall—an outlet originally launched by the Heritage Foundation and subsequently bought by the Christian Right Salem Media Group.
The fact that BIden COVID adviser Ashish Jha only now is stating COVID had a lab origin, despite surely having known this for six years, makes it clear that the Overton Window has shifted, and Fauci and Fauci’s ‘Proximal Origin’ fraudsters have lost control of the narrative,” wrote Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright, founder of the fringe lab leak group BioSafety now.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, meanwhile, who briefly served as the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research under Trump before his unceremonious exit, twice, offered his take in a video for his YouTube channel and X.
“I think it is good that he’s saying this, and it’s going to shift the Overton Window,” Prasad mused. “And we may someday actually be able to get some more honesty on all of the issues in the pandemic, which the media is just still completely dishonest about.”
Renowned vaccine scientist and pediatrician Dr. Peter Hotez, however, had a different response to the former COVID czar. In a post on X, Hotez, who himself has faced threats and harassment for his public health advocacy, noted that “There are at least a half dozen papers in our best scientific journals including @ScienceMagazine @CellCellPress detailing the zoonotic spillover origins of SARS-2 Covid, each more or less matching the origins of SARS-1 and MERS. We’ve had 3 major coronavirus epidemics/pandemics in this new century and most likely a 4th one is circulating in bats just like the others.”
“In contrast we don’t have a single paper on lab leak nor [gain-of-function research], most likely bc it never occurred,” Hotez continued. “And [by the way] there’s a major coronavirus virus research institute in every major Chinese city established after SARS-1 in 2002-2003.”