This is intercepted.

I'm Maya Hibbit, an editor with the Intercept.

It's been a year and a half since the World Health Organization labeled COVID-19 a pandemic.

All right, we have breaking news now. Let's get to it. It has to do with COVID-19.

And the World Health Organization has just declared a global coronavirus.

It is a pandemic at this point. And we're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity

and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.

But when the novel coronavirus started spreading across the world, most people were more concerned

with whether they were going to catch it than where it came from.

But there was one unhinged executive who quickly found a culprit.

But you don't hear them talking about COVID. COVID. To be specific, COVID-19.

That name gets further and further away from China as opposed to calling it the Chinese virus.

Like so many of his comments, Trump's claims were not only racist, xenophobic, and stupid, but they were also an unfortunate, flattening force.

The former president's supporters and subscribers in the government and media spread this rhetoric.

And the notion that the pandemic-causing disease was cooked up in a Chinese lab, spread on the right almost as quickly as the virus itself did.

China, the same country that controls 96% of antibiotics we use in this nation, the same country that is warning to cut off drug exports to the US to kill Americans,

is now trying to hide the reality of where coronavirus came from.

And on the left, the notions dismissal as a conspiracy theory happened just as quickly, with just as little scrutiny from the majority of people who peddled it.

Well, I'm a scientist, and what I do is I look at the evidence around a hypothesis. There is a huge amount of evidence that these viruses repeatedly emerge into people from wild animals in rural areas through things like hunting and eating wildlife.

There is zero evidence that this virus came out of a lab in China.

The partisan divide had done it again. There was almost no room for serious inquiry or debate.

But what Trump didn't realize, or maybe just didn't care about, was that if the coronavirus did emerge from a lab in Wuhan, China, there are members of his government in Washington, D.C., who could arguably be complicit.

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