Biden COVID response coordinator admits pandemic origin 'probably was a lab leak'
Former Biden White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, revealed on a Sunday interview on CNN that he believes COVID-19 was caused by a lab leak, noting this is a departure from his initial beliefs.
Former Biden White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha revealed in a Sunday interview on CNN that he believes COVID-19 was likely caused by a lab leak.
During the interview with CNN's Dana Bash, she highlighted how Jha had retweeted commentator Jamie Metzl’s lengthy social media post saying he believed COVID-19 originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
While the lab leak theory was widely disputed early in the pandemic and some social media platforms restricted certain related claims under their COVID-19 misinformation policies, Jha responded by declaring in 2026, "I pretty much agree with everything here."
After Bash highlighted the tweet, he confirmed he agreed with it — marking a change from the initial beliefs he held upon when first entering the Biden administration.
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White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 26, 2022. ((AP Photo/Susan Walsh))
"This is going to surprise some people. You know, when I went into the White House, my view was, ‘This was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak,’" he said. "Based on information I learned and based on information I‘ve seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak."
"Here‘s the bottom line. No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are people — officials in China — and we still need transparency and accountability on that. So that is my best assessment. I‘m not suggesting I know for sure, but I‘m saying my best assessment is that it probably was a lab leak," he said.
"That is definitely news to hear that from you for sure," Bash replied. "And shows that we‘re just, we‘re still learning, which is really important."
Jha later posted a clip of his conversation with Bash to his X account, with the following message:
"My view on COVID origins isn't new — I've held it since my time at the White House," he wrote. "Here's the truth: no one in America knows for sure. Anyone telling you they do is selling you something Based on strong circumstantial evidence I've seen, I think lab leak is much more likely. Not engineered. Not deliberate. Accidental Reasonable people can look at the same evidence and disagree."
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a crisis of credibility across institutions regarding how they spoke to the public and how much they in turn allowed the public or even fellow members of the media to speak. While the lab leak theory is more commonly accepted today as a plausible theory, many initially theorized that the pandemic occurred through natural transmission, such as from a Chinese wet market.
Many news organizations, like CNN, MS NOW, The New York Times and The Washington Post, dismissed the lab leak theory as a "debunked" conspiracy theory before uncovering the facts, and watchdogs in the years since have suggested this hurt the media’s already struggling credibility.
A prominent example of this was taxpayer-funded NPR. In April of 2020, NPR ran pieces on back-to-back days dismissing the lab leak notion, painting it as a debunked conspiracy theory embraced by the right for political purposes. One such story was headlined, "Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory of Pandemic Emergence," and misled readers into thinking the lab leak theory was truly discredited.
The impact of the COVID-19 virus and the lockdowns that followed are still being felt years later. (iStock)
CNN was criticized for incidents such as publishing a report that boasted of the country's coronavirus vaccination rates, according to data provided by China. Another salient example, however, was a piece released by the network actually touting China’s authoritarian government as ideal for cracking down on a pandemic.
"For those still reluctant, China has a powerful tool in its arsenal: a top-down, one-party system that is all-encompassing in reach and forceful in action, and a sprawling bureaucracy that can be swiftly mobilized," two CNN journalists based in Hong Kong wrote. "The top-down approach has been touted by officials as a strength of the Chinese system that helped curb the virus – and has again been deployed to accelerate inoculations."
Another aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic was unprecedented levels of mass censorship across social media. The Biden administration was sued in a high profile First Amendment case after it worked around the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor Americans questioning the narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic on its behalf.
Under the settlement, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are barred for the next decade from threatening or coercing social media companies to remove or suppress protected speech. The agreement also blocks officials from giving directions on or vetoing platforms' content moderation decisions.
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One memorable moment that showed a rift within the media itself was when Jon Stewart locked horns with his old friend Stephen Colbert, who had formerly been part of "The Daily Show" before hosting his own. While Colbert was cautious about questioning experts, Stewart mocked the idea that people were hesitant to consider the theory.
"Oh my God, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask, the Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab! That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?"
He added further, "Then they ask the scientists, ‘Wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab, how did this happen?’ And they’re like, 'A penguin kissed a turtle?’"
"‘Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Penn. What do you think happened?’ I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean," he said. "Or it’s the f---ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it!" he joked further.
Fox News Digital's Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Brian Flood, and Tyler McCarthy contributed to this report.
