The “conspiracy theory” that became the official position of three US agencies

In 2020, if you wrote a post saying SARS-CoV-2 (the COVID-19 virus) might have come out of a lab in Wuhan, there was a good chance that post got deleted. Not “disputed”. Deleted.

Today the CIA, the FBI and the US Department of Energy all consider a lab origin the most likely explanation.

The science didn't change. What changed was what you were allowed to say. And that gap — between what was true and what was sayable — is the story actually worth telling.

Where the facts stand today

Let's go step by step, and honestly, because this is a subject where everybody overreaches.

The American agencies are split. In January 2025 the CIA moved to assessing, with low confidence, that a research-related origin is more likely than a natural origin such as a bat. It joined the FBI, whose then-director said in 2023 that the most likely origin was a lab incident in Wuhan, and the Department of Energy, which reached a similar conclusion that same year, also with low confidence.

And here's a detail almost nobody mentions: the CIA's shift wasn't based on any new evidence. It was a re-analysis of the same data, commissioned under the Biden administration. No definitive proof appeared. What appeared was the political will to look again.

The Fauci case

This is where it stops being about virology and starts being about power.

May 2021. Anthony Fauci, then director of NIAID, tells the Senate that the NIH never funded and does not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Confronted later, he repeats it: he never lied to Congress, and he takes nothing back.

July 2023. The House subcommittee releases an internal Fauci email dated 1 February 2020. In it, weeks into the pandemic, Fauci acknowledges the concern that the virus could have been genetically manipulated — precisely because gain-of-function research was running in Wuhan and the outbreak had started there.

In private, in February 2020, the hypothesis was on the table among the highest American scientific officials. In public, for over a year, anyone raising it was treated as a lunatic.

The committee concluded in its report that Fauci's testimony was, at minimum, misleading — built on definitions of “gain of function” so narrow they covered anything.

Other ugly things surfaced along the way. David Morens, a close adviser to Fauci, was criticised by Republicans and Democrats alike for using private email to handle COVID origins and dodge federal record disclosure rules. The Justice Department would later charge him with concealing communications.

January 2025. On his way out, Biden grants Fauci a pre-emptive pardon — with no charges filed — covering anything he might have done between 1 January 2014 and the date of the pardon. You may think it was legitimate defence against political persecution. But the question stands: why 2014, six years before the pandemic?

29 July 2026. Fauci is heard, under subpoena, by the Senate Homeland Security Committee chaired by Rand Paul. And he pleads the Fifth — the right against self-incrimination — more than a hundred times.

6 August 2026. The committee votes to hold him in contempt. Paul argues that with the pardon Fauci faced no federal prosecution risk and could simply have told the truth. Democrats answer that the goal was to catch him out and open new lines of investigation, and that the vote will make all future oversight harder. The Justice Department says it received the referral, is reviewing it, and won't say whether it will investigate.

I won't pretend I know what he has to hide. Maybe nothing. But there's an image that's hard to ignore: the man presented for two years as the embodiment of science, sitting before the Senate, invoking the right to silence a hundred times.

The part that interests me most: the gatekeepers

In February 2020 a group of scientists published a letter in the Lancet condemning “conspiracy theories” about a non-natural origin of the virus. That letter set the tone for everything that followed: from then on, discussing the subject meant siding with the crazies.

The letter was organised by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance — the organisation channelling American funding into bat coronavirus research at precisely the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The conflict of interest was not declared at the time. EcoHealth would eventually be suspended from federal funding.

And then there were the platforms. Facebook explicitly banned posts claiming COVID was man-made in a lab — and only lifted the ban in May 2021, when the hypothesis became politically respectable again.

Notice what that means: a private company decided, based on the declared consensus of a group of experts with undisclosed interests, the boundary of global public debate for more than a year.

This isn't conspiracy theory. It's documented, with dates.