In a flurry of tweets last week, Elon Musk declared that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” and was pure “evil.” One of the prime sins of the international development body, he said, was its alleged role in starting the pandemic.
“Did you know,” he tweeted, “that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19, that killed millions of people?”
Several of Trump’s other senior appointees have also touted this theory that Covid-19 is not just the result of a lab leak, but is a genetically engineered virus—and perhaps even a bioweapon—created in part thanks to US funding. This belief, which has been consistently refuted, has become a North Star for the new administration.
The list of Trump appointees who have endorsed this or similar theories is long. There is Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE); Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is likely to be confirmed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); Tulsi Gabbard, the newly confirmed director of national intelligence; and Jay Bhattacharya, incoming director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Others, like CIA director John Ratcliffe, have bolstered the claim that Covid-19 was leaked from a state-run lab in Wuhan, but have stopped short of calling it a bioweapon.
And then there are the Republicans in both houses of Congress who have spent the past four years subpoenaing witnesses, demanding documents, and alleging that the US government was responsible for the pandemic.
The new administration has explicitly said that it intends to curtail research on infectious diseases, ban a wide swath of virological work, and perhaps even prosecute those who, it believes, created the Covid-19 pandemic. As one former CDC staffer describes it to WIRED, “There is a vendetta.”
The Takeover
Last year, economist Peter Navarro wrote a book laying out an agenda for a second Trump term in office. “During President Trump’s second term, he will get to the bottom of the origins of Covid-19 and ensure that all parties responsible for causing the pandemic and then covering up its origins will be held both financially and criminally responsible for their actions,” wrote Navarro, who is now a senior trade and manufacturing adviser to the president. He added that Trump should “use his constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation” to investigate Fauci and other research scientists for their role in creating Covid-19. “They will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and be held legally liable for any costs they helped inflict.”
WIRED has spoken to a number of scientists who are familiar with the myriad agencies and departments which handle virology, epidemiology, and public health—including the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and USAID—including some who have been forced to resign in recent days. All sources requested anonymity for fear of personal or professional retribution.
Multiple sources confirmed to WIRED that Musk’s DOGE teams have been visiting the NIH and CDC this month. A source provided WIRED with a personnel listing for Luke Farritor, a former SpaceX intern. It reveals that Farritor is designated as an employee within HHS, as first reported by Politico, without security clearance. His role is listed as “executive engineer—EO.” Scientists inside government and out have been frantically backing up critical databases and research, fearful that the new administration intends to pull this data offline.
One former official, who resigned, tells WIRED that the DOGE teams at CDC were hunting for particular files in the archive. Staffers at the CDC campus have concerns that Musk’s team could be using this information to potentially file subpoenas.
Researchers and former staff also point to incoming staff as a sign for worry.
There is, for example, Andrew Huff, author of a book claiming that Covid-19 was man-made. According to his X profile, Huff will be joining Kennedy at HHS as an assistant secretary; he lists his business address on X as “Make America Healthy Again Ln, Washington DC 20201,” the zipcode for HHS. Huff has explicitly called for former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Anthony Fauci and others to be tried by military tribunal. Huff did not return a request for comment as to whether military tribunals should be convened.
CDC sources also point to Bryce Nickels, a geneticist at Rutgers University. Two sources believe Nickles was involved with transition efforts and could possibly play a larger role in the new administration. Nickels has called for an outright ban on gain-of-function—a term that generally describes virological experiments that could give a virus new traits—as it can produce “bioweapon agents that pose an existential threat to humanity.” He has gone on to claim that those who oppose Kennedy’s confirmation to the head of HHS “fear being held accountable for their role in causing the Covid-19 pandemic.” Nickels did not return a request for comment.
“Most of us scientists have felt sort of virtuous,” one former government scientist tells WIRED. “Now you can’t feel that way anymore. Now you feel like you’re the enemy, and you’re being hunted out like a rat in a sewer.”
Gain-of-Function Paranoia
While there are many, including scientists and those in the US intelligence community, who believe that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, causing the 2020 pandemic, some associated with the new Trump administration represent a considerably more radical version of this theory. They believe the virus had been modified and made more transmissible by researchers at the Institute. In particular, adherents to this theory believe that Covid-19 was the product of gain-of-function work—produced either by recklessness or malice. From there, they claim, the virus either accidentally escaped or was deliberately released.
While the US intelligence community is split on whether the virus spilled over from nature or leaked from a lab, a 2023 report from the director of national intelligence reported that “almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted … All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon” (It did note that “some [agencies] are unable to make a determination.”)
Yet Kennedy argues in his 2023 book The Wuhan Cover-Up that the Chinese lab had been engaged in “reckless gain-of-function bioweapons research” that constructed Covid-19. Bhattacharya has also alleged that the US government engaged in a massive Covid-19 “cover-up.”
With time, that theory snowballed. Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney, paints this crusade in terms of a “pyramid of guilt.” At the top, he says, is Fauci. Below him is Peter Daszak, the former president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York–based NGO that has received considerable US funding to surveil zoonotic viruses around the world and which collaborated on research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In 2022, this theory mutated to encompass the NIH, CDC, and even the Pentagon. A QAnon influencer, with the help of Russian propaganda, popularized the idea that the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine was a pretext to destroy American-run biological weapons labs—“biolabs”—in that country. Gabbard later echoed that theory, raising the possibility in an interview with Tucker Carlson that America was conducting research on biological weapons in Ukraine. “If they have nothing to hide, why are they trying so hard to hide it?” she told Carlson. (Gabbard later insisted she was only worried about biolabs, which she said were experimenting “with dangerous pathogens.”) Kennedy was more blunt, claiming “we have biolabs in Ukraine because we’re developing bioweapons.” The Pentagon has insisted, as have the countries running these labs, that the funding is meant to track infectious disease and prevent epidemics.
In a December 2022 report on the origins of Covid-19, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee alleged that the US Intelligence Community “downplayed the possibility that SARS-CoV2 was connected to China’s bioweapons program based in part on input from outside experts.”
The far-reaching conspiracy theory stretched to include USAID, which provided grants that funded the research conducted through EcoHealth; the World Health Organization; and dozens of other scientists and researchers, Holmes says, himself included. Holmes provided extensive evidence for the theory that Covid-19 emerged from the live animal market in Wuhan and has been targeted by conspiracy theorists ever since.
Now the progenitors of and adherents to these conspiracy theories are in office, with some awaiting confirmation to lead the very agencies they accuse of killing millions. They are taking aim at those who, they say, are responsible.
On January 17, just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Health and Human Services announced—following years of allegations from Republicans, Kennedy, and others that it was likely responsible for the pandemic—that EcoHealth Alliance would be debarred, and no longer eligible to receive federal grant money. (The organization’s funding had been suspended earlier in 2024.) Sources who spoke with WIRED say this will likely be the end for EcoHealth, which has been a leading researcher of zoonotic infectious diseases for decades.
In a February 3 statement, the White House justified closing down USAID and laying off its staffers around the world by citing “waste and abuse,” including, among a variety of other reasons, “millions to EcoHealth Alliance—which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab.”
These moves build on four years of Republican-led Congressional studies and hearings, which have aggressively advanced the allegation that American funding helped craft Covid-19—and they have targeted individual scientists and bureaucrats who, they say, are responsible.
A week after the inauguration, US senator Rand Paul of Kentucky issued a flurry of congressional subpoenas to 14 agencies, including the NIH and HHS. The senator said the continuing investigation was being conducted in order to “critique the process that allowed this dangerous research, that may have led to the pandemic.”
In one subpoena sent to a Pentagon agency, Paul is seeking “all records related to whistleblower disclosures or complaints of waste, fraud, and abuse involving the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, dual use research of concern, or life sciences research,” according to a copy of the subpoena provided to WIRED. He is further seeking any funding provided to EcoHealth Alliance by USAID and other departments.
A staffer at one of the agencies targeted by the subpoena says they have already furnished the senator with tens of thousands of records under previous subpoenas—all of them proving that their agency does critical work in tracking and containing infectious disease outbreaks around the world. And yet, they say, they feel they are still being targeted by Paul and other Republicans with the allegation that they are building bioweapons. “It won’t die.”
Many of the sources who spoke to WIRED said they fear this witch hunt could accelerate in the months to come. More acutely, they worry that America may be destroying its ability to anticipate, surveil, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks.
“They have an assumption that virology research is inherently dangerous and there really aren’t many benefits to it,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.
“They’re just going to completely decimate science and our understanding of the world, and our ability to fight pandemics, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and all the rest of it,” one researcher predicts, “which is dumb as a rock.”
This doesn’t seem to bother Kennedy. In at least two of his books, he characterizes virtually all virological work as bioweapons research. In a November 2023 speech to the virulently anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which he served as chairman of prior to his aborted presidential campaign, Kennedy vowed “to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
The Consequences
That potential pivot away from infectious disease research and toward chronic diseases comes as the US faces an outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu. “Our epidemiologists are [looking for] the very first case of human-to-human transmission, is not even a needle in a haystack—it’s a needle in a stack of needles,” says the former CDC official.
Last Wednesday evening, a senior adviser at the CDC responsible for the H5N1 policy response, Erin Abramsohn, announced her resignation. In a LinkedIn post, Abramsohn cited working with her team through “chaos and uncertainty, transition, reorganization, preparation, and response,” and mentioned her efforts to back up her files before resigning.
Rasmussen and some colleagues have also been racing to archive the massive volumes of government research, fearing that it could be taken offline completely—as has been done at USAID and elsewhere.
The former CDC official adds that the new administration seems set on changing how vaccines will be recommended to the public, and how the CDC can communicate vaccine effectiveness—particularly to vulnerable populations. Like most US government agencies, CDC and NIH have also been given edicts to delete references to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across their websites.
“We had to go through and scrub language from survey questions and documents, and internal and external websites,” the ex-CDC official says. “If you can’t get it, you pull the whole webpage down.”
Sources tell WIRED that this language edict extends to ongoing research. Scientists have been forced to scour their questionnaires and edit their yet-to-be-published papers to remove reverences to gender or transgender people.
“I think we’re really worried,” the former CDC official says, “about how much damage that’s going to be done that we can’t undo.”