NIH scrubs Biden-era COVID origin narrative from website following Blaze News reporting

The National Institutes of Health told Blaze News on Friday that it updated its website to remove claims from the previous administration that dismissed the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.

'The NIH has removed these factually incorrect positions from the last administration.'

As of Thursday, an NIH webpage stated:

Unfortunately, because the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 have not yet been identified, misleading and false allegations have been made about NIAID-supported research on naturally occurring bat coronaviruses. Specifically, these allegations have targeted research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, funded through a subaward from NIAID grantee EcoHealth Alliance. The naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied through this subaward were significantly, genetically different from SARS-CoV-2 and, therefore, could not have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

Blaze News contacted the NIH, inquiring whether it was aware of the webpage — which was last reviewed in March 2022 — and if it had plans to update its website to remove statements that the lab-leak theory was a hoax.

The NIH responded on Friday, stating that it had recently updated the website.

Department of Health and Human Services communications director Andrew Nixon stated, "The Biden era NIH position on origin of the COVID pandemic — that the lab-leak theory is a 'conspiracy theory' — is out of line with the considerable scientific and forensic evidence to the contrary. The NIH has removed these factually incorrect positions from the last administration."

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Blaze News confirmed that as of Friday afternoon, the NIH had taken down the webpage. It now reads, "You are not authorized to access this page."

Nixon added that the "true origin" of the virus could be found on the White House's website, which states that COVID-19 "possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature" and that the data supports that cases stemmed from "a single introduction into humans." The website further notes the Wuhan lab's "history of conducting gain-of-function research ... at inadequate biosafety levels."

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The Trump administration's National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya was one of the prominent voices during the COVID era insisting that there was a cover-up regarding the origins of the virus.

Bhattacharya told Politico in May that he is "convinced" the research experiments in Wuhan, China, "led to this pandemic through a lab leak."

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