Who was President in 2019?
We need to think carefully before making broad partisan claims about COVID-19. Overstating our case does not help us.
It is almost certain that COVID-19 was created in a laboratory in Red China, as part of "gain of function" research. It's possible that this was a biological weapon, but it is more likely that the "gain of function" research was meant to research coronaviruses and ways to combat them in the event that such a virus jumps from another mammal (like bats) to humans. Red China did not want to lose face after the virus escaped the lab due to what was probably very lax safety precautions, so they covered it up and kidnapped truth-tellers. The United Nations then openly lied about human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 to help Red China cover up the spread of the virus in the critical opening days of the pandemic.
With that said, we need to think carefully before making broad partisan claims about COVID-19. James Woods claimed that "High ranking Democrats up to and including Joseph Biden engaged in a criminal coverup" regarding the virus. Which leads to an obvious question: Who was President in 2019 when COVID-19 was created and then spread across the world?
Donald Trump was President when federal agencies under his authority "advised" (pressured) social media companies to heavily suppress the lab leak theory. Was President Trump too weak in 2020 to stop federal agencies from doing that, especially considering the vast majority of people (correctly) pointing out the lab leak origins of the virus were his supporters?
President Trump signed an executive order in 2025 restricting federal funding for the kind of dangerous "gain of function" research that led to the creation of COVID-19. If he had the authority to do that in 2025, he had the authority to do it in 2020 when it was becoming increasingly clear that SARS-COV-2 was created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Was President Trump too weak in 2020 to stop federal agencies from funding that research?
My point is this: We need to be careful not to overstate our case in domestic politics, especially regarding claims of a vast Deep State conspiracy run by Democrats. Donald Trump, after all, was President during the first 13 months of the pandemic and had been in office nearly three years at that point. There was certainly cynical political gamesmanship, mismanagement and corruption associated with the pandemic, but there was also a lot of fumbling around dealing with a brand new virus that had many people justifiably frightened. It is better to focus on what is easily proven (and there is a lot of that) than to overreach.
