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Since regaining power, the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed with false certainty that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab.

In late January, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that a lab leak is “the confirmable truth.” 

In mid-April, covid.gov and covidtests.gov, websites the government previously used to educate the public about the disease and allow people to place orders for free tests, redirected to a new, splashy White House webpage that declared a lab leak the “true origins” of COVID-19. 

This month, in explaining a nearly $18 billion proposed cut to the National Institutes of Health, President Donald Trump’s budget request for the next fiscal year stated that a lab origin “is now confirmed by several intelligence agencies.”

But there has been no such confirmation. In late January, the CIA joined the FBI and the Department of Energy in concluding a lab origin is “most likely.” But those determinations were each made with low or moderate confidence, and the agencies don’t agree on the source lab. As many as five other intelligence bodies lean toward a natural origin or are undecided.

Joel Wertheim, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego who has published research on how the pandemic began, told us the website is “untrue.”

As we’ve explained before, the origin of the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is unknown. Multiple lines of scientific evidence, however, point to a natural origin, with the virus spilling over into humans from animals through the illegal wildlife trade in China. That is similar to what has happened in the past, including in the early 2000s with SARS, when a similar coronavirus caused a respiratory disease outbreak that began in China.

“There’s overwhelming scientific evidence that COVID emerged from an animal market in Wuhan, which was miles away from a virology lab,” Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us.

While for many scientists the evidence for a natural origin is convincing, no intermediate animal has been found harboring a virus highly similar to SARS-CoV-2, so the theory remains unproved. Some scientists are uncertain and some favor a lab leak.

It is unclear on what specific information the intelligence agencies are basing their determinations. Scientists who have studied the origins question closely have encouraged more transparency, but note that the scientific aspect of the investigation is highly technical. Michael Worobey, an expert in virus evolution at the University of Arizona who is an author of several of the major COVID-19 origins papers, told the Associated Press in 2023 that he doubted the individuals making the assessments “have the scientific expertise … to really understand the most important evidence.”

Other Trump officials have also recently endorsed a lab leak, even if they do not always frame it as definitive. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, for example, said the pandemic was “probably the result of some scientists messing with Mother Nature” and that a lab leak “is now the leading theory among scientists.” In congressional testimony on May 15, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated that multiple agencies “have all agreed that NIH research almost certainly led to the pandemic.”

Those statements are unsupported or contradicted by available evidence. As we said, there is neither a consensus nor strong confidence among the different U.S. intelligence agencies that there was a lab leak. But one thing nearly all did agree on, according to a declassified 2023 report, is that the coronavirus “was not genetically engineered.”

Scientists have also previously told us that it’s virtually impossible that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered.

“SARS-CoV-2 shows no evidence of being manipulated or passage[d] in a laboratory prior to its emergence,” Wertheim said. “The scientific literature is emphatic on this point, with broad consensus even among scientists who disagree regarding the particulars of the location and timing of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.”

There is also little to suggest that scientists now prefer the lab leak theory, as Makary said. In 2023, 156 scientists penned a commentary in the Journal of Virology that said that the zoonosis hypothesis, or the idea that the virus spilled over to humans from an animal, “has the strongest supporting evidence,” while lab leak scenarios have “no compelling evidence.” Subsequently, another 120 scientists with the Australasian Virology Society wrote to the journal to agree. A 2024 survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute also found scientists overwhelmingly favored a natural origin.

Wertheim objected to Makary’s characterization, noting that the “peer-reviewed literature is dominated by articles supporting a zoonotic origin” while lab leak papers “are rare, fringe, and mutually incompatible with each other.”

Claims that the NIH funded work that led to the pandemic have been promoted for years. But as we’ve repeatedly explained, the small amount of NIH grant money that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded experiments using viruses that are very different from SARS-CoV-2 and could not have led to the creation of the coronavirus.

When asked what the Trump administration’s certainty about a lab leak was based on, and why it discounted the published research that supports a natural origin, White House spokesman Kush Desai pointed to the Intelligence Community assessments.

“Multiple intelligence agency assessments have now substantiated that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak – an idea that the mainstream media once completely wrote off as a lunatic fringe conspiracy theory,” he told us in an email. “While the media continues to decimate what’s left of its record-low credibility, the Trump administration remains committed to transparency for the American people.”

HHS did not respond to a similar inquiry about Kennedy’s and Makary’s statements.

Factually Inaccurate Website

In addition to incorrectly presenting a lab leak as an established fact, the White House webpage lists five numbered statements purporting to bolster its case. Each is either incorrect or misleading. We’ll address them one by one (the italic emphasis in each statement is the White House’s).

A screenshot of the new White House webpage.

“The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.” False. This is presumably a reference to SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site, or FCS, a short sequence that helps the virus enter cells. Much of the speculation about the coronavirus being lab-generated has stemmed from this site, since no other SARS-related coronavirus is known to have a FCS. But as we’ve explained before, the sites do exist in other, more distant coronaviruses. As a result, while unusual, the FCS is not inherently suspicious.

“It is most certainly found in nature,” Wertheim said. 

“Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.” Data do not show this. A Science paper published in 2022, which analyzed genomic data from early COVID-19 cases, concluded that there were likely at least two spillovers from animals to humans.

Wertheim, who was a co-author of that paper, said he took “particular umbrage” with this claim because “it was an uphill battle to convince other scientists that not only did multiple introductions occur, but that multiple introductions would be expected.”

“Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels.” Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which worked on bat coronaviruses and genetically manipulated some of them. But there’s no evidence the WIV worked on any viruses remotely similar enough to have given rise to SARS-CoV-2 (whether the experiments qualified as gain-of-function is also subject to debate). 

The intense focus on such issues is in many ways irrelevant, since the scientific literature is “unified” in concluding that the coronavirus “was not subject to manipulation or ‘gain-of-function’ experiments prior to its emergence,” Wertheim said.

The presence of the institute can seem too unlikely to be a coincidence, but as we’ve explained before, Wuhan is a hub for the wildlife trade and is home to some 11 million people. The population density is key, since a spillover in rural China would likely have simply fizzled out, Wertheim said.

Much is often made about the long distance between Wuhan and where SARS-CoV-2’s closest ancestors were identified in bats. But the coronavirus behind the 2002 SARS epidemic, which everyone agrees was a natural spillover, also traveled a similar distance to Guangdong. A paper published in May in Cell, co-authored by Wertheim, documents the similarities between the two cases and implicates travel via the wildlife trade for both.

“Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.” Rumors of sick WIV workers — with various details shifting over time — have circulated since 2020, as we’ve explained before. But the U.S. Intelligence Community has already said that the information is not relevant to the question of how the pandemic began. 

Because “the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19,” the 2023 declassified report explains, the IC “continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins.”

“By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.” There is evidence of a natural origin; it’s just not conclusive. The lack of an intermediate animal — which might prove a natural origin, and is presumably what this is referencing — does not mean that the coronavirus must have originated in a lab.

As we have written, the wet market where the first COVID-19 cases were recognized was quickly shut down. While some animal testing occurred early on, it was primarily in species that would not be expected to be the animals that transferred the virus to humans. China has also demonstrated little to no interest in looking any further for an intermediate animal, insisting instead that the virus came from abroad, including from the U.S.

“Evidence of zoonosis has surfaced,” Wertheim said, noting that there is now genetic evidence that animals known to transmit SARS-like viruses were in the same part of the market where the first cases were found, with remnants of SARS-CoV-2 where the animals were kept. “This evidence is exactly what you would expect to find had a zoonotic virus emerged.”

That’s in addition to the epidemiology data, which show the earliest COVID-19 cases cluster around the market, even those without a known connection to the market.

Again, all of this doesn’t formally rule out a lab leak. But it’s incorrect to claim that the lack of an intermediate animal is strong evidence of a lab leak.

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A House-passed reconciliation bill would reduce federal funding to states that provide state-funded health insurance to people in the U.S. illegally, resulting in 1.4 million people losing coverage, according to a preliminary Congressional Budget Office analysis. But President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers have wrongly cast the bill as removing these immigrants from Medicaid.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state government program that provides health coverage for low-income individuals and families. People living in the U.S. illegally are not eligible to receive Medicaid benefits other than for emergency medical services.

“A state funded program is by definition not Medicaid,” Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us in an email.

But in a May 16 Truth Social post encouraging Republican lawmakers to support the wide-ranging House budget bill, which makes changes to Medicaid and extends expiring income tax cuts, among other things, Trump said the legislation would remove from Medicaid “millions” of people illegally residing in the country.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks during a press conference celebrating the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on May 22. Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

“Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!,'” Trump’s post reads. “Not only does it cut Taxes for ALL Americans, but it will kick millions of Illegal Aliens off of Medicaid to PROTECT it for those who are the ones in real need.”

As for the tax cuts, about 80% of U.S. households – not 100% – would receive them under the bill, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

To support his Medicaid claim, the White House sent us a May 13 social media post from the Republican-led House Committee on Energy and Commerce. That post on X about “strengthening Medicaid” by “eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse” suggested that “1.4 million illegal immigrants” would lose Medicaid coverage as a result of the bill, according to a “preliminary CBO estimate on coverage changes.”

The CBO estimated that overall, the Medicaid provisions in the Republican bill would reduce the number of people with Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage by 10.3 million by 2034, though some would retain or acquire other insurance. A net 7.6 million people would become uninsured, CBO said.

But the agency did not say that 1.4 million people in the U.S. illegally would lose Medicaid benefits.

The Senate Republicans account on X wrongly claimed in a May 20 post that the bill “protects Medicaid for eligible Americans by removing 1.4 million illegals.” That was a day after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also inaccurately claimed that, under the bill, “the 1.4 million illegal aliens who are currently improperly receiving Medicaid benefits will be kicked off the program to preserve it for hardworking American citizens who need it.”

And after the House narrowly passed the bill early on May 22 with only Republican votes, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that Democrats voting against the bill showed they wanted “Medicaid for illegal immigrants.”

CBO, which analyzed provisions in an early draft of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s portion of the House budget bill, said that, in 2034, 1.4 million people would lose “other coverage” — specifically health insurance through “state-only funded programs” under current law.

The 1.4 million “includes people without verified citizenship, nationality, or satisfactory immigration status,” the CBO said.

Those individuals are presumed to lose their state-provided health benefits because the House bill includes language penalizing states that provide “any form of financial assistance” for health coverage or “any form of comprehensive health benefits” to immigrants living in the country illegally “regardless of the source of funding.”

For those states, the bill proposes reducing from 90% to 80% the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage rate that the federal government is required to pay to states that expanded Medicaid for eligible individuals under the Affordable Care Act.

The CBO analysis assumes that at least some states, deterred by reduced federal payments for their Medicaid programs, would stop offering their state-funded health programs to immigrants without lawful immigration status, leaving more than 1 million of them uninsured.

But those individuals would not come from the Medicaid program.

“Medicaid is when a state is accepting federal Medicaid dollars in compliance with federal Medicaid coverage rules,” Cuello, the Georgetown University professor, told us. So the bill’s provisions aren’t about Medicaid, he said. “And of course, undocumented immigrants are also not eligible for comprehensive coverage in Medicaid.”

The health policy research group KFF said that, as of April, there were 14 states, plus the District of Columbia, that use state taxpayer money, not federal funds, to cover children regardless of immigration status, including seven states and D.C. that also cover some adults regardless of immigration status.

“So there are not millions of undocumented people losing [Medicaid] coverage because of this bill, since they don’t have comprehensive coverage under Medicaid to begin with, and the very limited emergency Medicaid coverage provided to immigrants is not changed under the bill,” Cuello said.

Cuello told us that hospitals can request reimbursement for providing emergency medical assistance, such as emergency labor and delivery, to people in the country illegally who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid if not for their immigration status. Those reimbursements are paid using state and federal money known as Emergency Medicaid funding.

KFF has said that less than 1% of all Medicaid spending is used for covering emergency care for immigrants who are not U.S. citizens. That information comes from a CBO report on fiscal years 2017 to 2023.

Since House Republicans have passed their bill, it now goes to the Senate for consideration.

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Former President Joe Biden’s office announced on May 18 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer two days earlier, following the discovery of a prostate nodule. President Donald Trump and others have suggested, without evidence, that Biden’s diagnosis had been known much earlier and hidden from the public. 

We can only report what Biden’s office has said. However, the timing of the diagnosis is plausible, since the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended against routine prostate cancer screenings for men over age 70.  

Trump wished Biden well in a May 18 Truth Social post, saying, “Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”

By the next day, however, Trump’s reaction had shifted. “I’m surprised that it wasn’t — the public wasn’t notified a long time ago,” Trump told reporters, suggesting that the condition had been concealed from the public during Biden’s presidency.

But there is no evidence that Biden was aware of the cancer before the May 16 diagnosis. A May 20 statement from a Biden spokesperson said his last known PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, test “was in 2014. Prior to [May 16], President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer.”

The PSA test measures the amount of a specific protein produced by cancerous and noncancerous tissue in the prostate, a small gland below the bladder in males.

Experts in prostate cancer told us it is likely that Biden’s cancer began growing years ago. But at age 82, he had not been tested since his early 70s. The diagnosis was made after Biden experienced urinary symptoms, the New York Times reported.

“It is almost certain that President Biden had prostate cancer for months if not many years prior to his diagnosis,” Dr. Daniel Spratt, chief of radiation oncology at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and Case Western Reserve University, told us. “This does not mean he or his physicians were aware of his diagnosis.”

Biden’s cancer is Stage 4, meaning the disease has spread, in his case to bone, with a Gleason score of 9, which refers to a more aggressive cancer.

Trump told reporters, “To get to Stage 9, that’s a long time,” confusing the cancer stage with the Gleason score. “You have to say, why did it take so long?” Trump said, adding later, “somebody is not telling the facts. It’s a big, it’s a big problem.”

The president’s son Donald Trump Jr., in a post on X, wrote, “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup???” Trump Jr. shared a post that claimed it was “highly likely” Biden’s diagnosis was known throughout his presidency.

Former First Lady Jill Biden’s doctorate is in education, not medicine, and Joe Biden’s cancer is Stage 4, not 5.

Leo Terrell, an official in Trump’s Department of Justice, reposted a baseless claim on X that Jill Biden knew about her husband’s health problems but still wanted him to seek a second term. “Elder Abuse! Criminal Charges??” Terrell wrote.

The timing of Biden’s cancer diagnosis also coincides with the release of a book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” which reports that Biden’s inner circle hid his deteriorating mental and physical health.

But, as we said, there is no evidence that Biden, his family or his doctors were aware of his prostate cancer before the diagnosis on May 16.

Recommendations on Testing

The latest guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force advise against PSA screening for prostate cancer in men who are 70 and older. The group’s 2018 recommendations, which are in the process of being updated, were based on finding with “moderate certainty” that the potential benefits “do not outweigh the expected harms.” The USPSTF is an independent panel of medical experts that issues recommendations on preventive screenings and medications.

For men 55 to 69 years of age, the task force said the decision to get a PSA test “should be an individual one,” and recommended that men discuss the pros and cons of testing with a clinician.

“Screening offers a small potential benefit of reducing the chance of death from prostate cancer in some men,” the USPSTF recommendation for the younger group says. “However, many men will experience potential harms of screening, including false-positive results that require additional testing and possible prostate biopsy; overdiagnosis and overtreatment; and treatment complications, such as incontinence and erectile dysfunction.”

Guidelines from other groups are broadly similar, often recommending that men only test after consulting with a health care provider, although some do not provide an age cut-off after which testing is advised against.

High PSA levels “may indicate the presence of prostate cancer. However, many other conditions, such as an enlarged or inflamed prostate, also can increase PSA levels. Therefore, determining what a high PSA score means can be complicated,” according to the Mayo Clinic.

Men with prostate cancer may also have normal PSA levels. “Some types of prostate cancer don’t cause elevated PSA levels. You may have prostate cancer even if a PSA test says your levels are normal,” the Cleveland Clinic explains.

Reconsidering Testing Guidelines

“Most prostate cancers are asymptomatic for a very long time,” Dr. Isaac Kim, chief of urology at Yale School of Medicine, told us. “When patients develop very large disease locally or extensively disseminated, symptoms develop. In general, it is considered that prostate cancer will become symptomatic when the disease is very very advanced.

“It appears that President Biden became symptomatic recently,” he added, which would explain why the cancer was diagnosed so late.

Doctors might have detected Biden’s cancer earlier if he had been tested, Kim said, “but it is very complicated. In many circles among doctors, prostate cancer screening is discouraged. This is true especially for men in their 70’s” and older, he said.

Some have argued that the standard guidelines should not always apply to a president. At the same time, deviating from them could mean subjecting a president to unnecessary risks or procedures.

Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a breast oncologist and vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that the way a president’s health is monitored, particularly one of Biden’s age, should be reassessed. “We have to have confidence that their health condition is not intervening,” he said.

In a May 19 interview on MSNBC, Emanuel, who was on a COVID-19 advisory board for the Biden administration, said that Biden likely had cancer “at the start of his presidency in 2021.” This was interpreted by some as an admission that a cancer diagnosis was hidden from the public. Emanuel, however, later told the Washington Post that he was only saying that the cancer was present during Biden’s presidency.

“I didn’t say that there was a conspiracy,” he said, adding that he “should have” clarified that he wasn’t saying Biden knew he had cancer.  “I was very clear that he did have cancer, that’s a fact. That he knew or didn’t know, I don’t know and they don’t know.”

Dr. Jeffrey Tosoian, who specializes in early diagnosis and management of urologic cancers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told us in an email that PSA testing became widely used for prostate cancer screening in the 1990s. That resulted in “a large reduction in the number of deaths caused by prostate cancer in the U.S. But PSA testing also led to a number of unnecessary prostate biopsies” and “detection of non-aggressive prostate cancers.”

The USPSTF then decided to recommend against PSA testing. “Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the reduction in PSA testing has been associated with an increase in diagnoses of metastatic prostate cancer in the U.S. … To many, the USPSTF decision to recommend against PSA screening was an example of throwing the baby (i.e. reducing death from prostate cancer) out with the bathwater (i.e. risk of negative outcomes from PSA testing),” Tosoian said.

“In the past decade-plus, several advances have improved the risk vs. benefit balance of PSA screening.” Tosoian said. “Based on these crucial improvements, many of us that care for patients with prostate cancer are hopeful that PSA screening will be better supported by forthcoming policy changes.”

Spratt, of Case Western Reserve, noted that “older men in studies consistently are more likely to harbor more aggressive prostate cancer. Thus, PSA screening should continue past 70 years old, but what doctors do with that information must be individualized to each patient to avoid over diagnosis and overtreatment.

“Fortunately, President Biden has many effective therapies to treat his prostate cancer, including image guided radiotherapy and various forms of therapy that can inhibit or block testosterone,” Spratt said. The hormone testosterone propels the growth of prostate cancer cells.

Gerald Denis, a research professor at the Shipley Prostate Cancer Research Center at Boston University’s medical school, said that prostate cancer that has spread to the bone is “generally considered to be advanced and incurable.” Survival after prostate cancer metastasis to bone is “only about 30 percent after five years,” Denis told BU Today.

“Generally speaking, there are many treatment options available to strengthen bones and slow tumor growth and spread, even if the bones are involved. In short, he can still be treated, and the progress of the cancer slowed, even if it is regarded as incurable,” Denis also said.

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In a salient moment with the leader of South Africa, President Donald Trump played a video that he said showed “burial sites” for a thousand white farmers — the victims of what he has called a genocide — along a roadside in South Africa.

Ramaphosa and Trump look on as a video plays in the Oval Office on May 21. Photo by Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images.

It actually showed a 2020 demonstration bringing attention to the issue of violence against farmers of all races in South Africa.

Trump made his comments during a May 21 Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa a week after the U.S. accepted the first white South African refugees, whom Trump has described as victims of genocide. Ramaphosa pushed back against the claim that there is a white genocide happening in South Africa, and in response, Trump had a staffer dim the lights to play a video.

Pointing to the screen, which showed an aerial view of a rural highway dotted on each side with white crosses, Trump said, “These are burial sites, right here. Burial sites — over a thousand of white farmers. And those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross and there’s approximately a thousand of them. They’re all white farmers. The family of white farmers.”

“I’d like to know where that is, because, this — I’ve never seen,” Ramaphosa said.

“I mean, it’s in South Africa,” Trump said.

Rather than burial sites, as Trump claimed, the video showed a demonstration following the August 2020 murder of Glen and Vida Rafferty, who had been killed during a robbery at their farmhouse in Normandien, a rural area about 200 miles southeast of Johannesburg. The crosses along the road were meant to memorialize and draw attention to the many farmers who have been killed over the years.

A screenshot of the video Trump showed of the 2020 demonstration in South Africa.

There is a real issue with South African farmers being killed. Although some have cast the killings as a “white genocide,” experts say that’s not accurate, as we wrote recently. Rather, they said, most of the violent acts are committed during robberies in a country where most of the wealth and land post-apartheid are still owned by a relatively small white minority. White people own about 72% of the farm and agricultural holdings despite making up about 7% of the population, according to a 2017 land audit report commissioned by the South African government.

And, experts told us, while there is a high rate of murder and violence in the country, there is no evidence that white farmers are being singled out. According to police data, murders of farmers are less than 1% of all murders in South Africa. There were 51 murders on farms in 2022-23, figures that aren’t delineated by race, out of a total of nearly 27,500 murders in the country.

“On average, 76 people are murdered in South Africa every day according to 2023/2024 official police statistics,” Lizette Lancaster, of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told us in an email.

“Robberies and murders on farms are recognised as a serious problem by all sectors of society,” she said, going on to explain, though, that “almost all South Africans from all walks of life will agree that there is no white genocide. The government has reacted to persistent claims of a white genocide and the conflation of that with farm murders since Democracy in 1994.”

In an interview with South Africa’s public broadcasting news service, Darell Brown, a farmer who helped organize the demonstration featured in the video Trump showed, said, “The message we’re trying to convey is: farm murders must stop. I don’t mean just murders of white commercial farmers. Farm murders must stop.” He explained that the roadside crosses were representative of farmers who had been killed and called on the government to take the issue seriously.

The demonstration was held on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2020, and took place along the P39 highway between the Raffertys’ home and the nearby town of Newcastle.

The South African news website IOL quoted a participant in the demonstration, Bob Hoatson, as saying that the initiative was not about white farmers: “It was for people from all walks of life who were concerned about farm murders,” he said.

During the Oval Office exchange, Trump asserted, “When they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.”

But according to Lancaster, it’s not true that “the government is willfully ignorant (e.g. police) or the security sector is actively complicit in the crimes committed against vulnerable groups.” In South Africa, she said, “government, public sector and community partnerships are yielding results. Farm murders have gone down, rural safety strategies are now in place, and there is nothing particularly exceptional about how gruesome these murders are when you look at the scale of violence in townships, for example.”

In the case of the Rafferty murders, three men have been convicted and are serving time in prison.

“The lives of farmers, farm workers and farm dwellers as well as every citizen of the country, black and white, matters,” then Deputy President David Mabuza said after the Rafferty murders, as he convened a meeting to discuss programs to curb violence against farmers. “It is for this reason that government will continue to work with the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster to ensure prevention as a priority in dealing with farm murders.”

While violence remains a serious issue in South Africa, the video Trump played did not show 1,000 “burial sites” or prove there is a white genocide in the country.

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