Newly appointed FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary pulled no punches as he directly accused the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of funding the lab responsible for creating the virus that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic and claimed the lives of over 20 million people globally.
Speaking to NewsNation’s Connell McShane, Dr. Makary blasted the former NIH leadership for pouring taxpayer dollars into unaccountable pet projects, including the now-infamous lab that engineered the virus that triggered a global pandemic.
Dr. Makary:
The way it used to be. We’re planning to change our health agencies for a generation or longer. Look at the NIH. When J. Bhattacharya came in there, it was a mess. Fourteen percent of the grants were descriptive studies on health equity.And the NIH had just funded a lab that brewed up a virus that killed 20 million people worldwide. So they’re getting back to studying root causes, a cure for cancer, debilitating neurodegenerative diseases, and they’re going to do good work.
Connell McShane:
Right, but you have to do it with fewer people. Is that a challenge with the cuts, or is that not really what it’s made out to be either?Dr. Makary:
The FDA is strong, and it’s going to continue to be strong. The cuts were consolidations. There were no layoffs to scientific reviewers or inspectors at the FDA.There was consolidation of the twelve travel offices at the FDA. And so we’re going to institute teamwork and break up the fiefdom culture within the agency. It’s an interesting conversation.
WATCH:
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary:
“The NIH had just funded a lab that brewed up a virus that killed 20 million people worldwide!” pic.twitter.com/ZtX9hH6vxX
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 30, 2025
Earlier this year, Trump’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued a new analysis on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, which favors the theory that COVID escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID. That’s a day-one thing for me,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Breitbart.
This further gives credibility to the findings by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s final report last year, concluding that “COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
Additionally, an FBI scientist came forward last month, claiming that the Biden administration deliberately sidelined critical evidence linking the origins of COVID-19 to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
According to Jason Bannan, a former senior microbiologist at the FBI, the FBI’s analysis, which concluded with “moderate confidence” that the virus originated in a laboratory, was excluded from a high-level intelligence briefing with President Biden in 2021.
In early April 2020, The Gateway Pundit was among the first to report that the Wuhan lab, Asia’s only Level 4 virology lab, was likely the epicenter of the pandemic.
Despite years of denial and censorship from government agencies, Big Tech, and mainstream media, the lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a conspiracy, has gained substantial traction, now supported by findings from the FBI and other experts.
Since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, government officials and medical institutions have fervently dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis, labeling it a “conspiracy theory.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and Dr. Anthony Fauci have repeatedly downplayed the possibility of a lab leak, insisting instead that the virus was transmitted from animals to humans.
