President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday afternoon ending the allocation of federal funding toward risky gain-of-function research in foreign countries like China, where the Covid-19 pandemic is believed to have originated.
The order targets the funding of gain-of-function research conducted in “countries of concern,” including Iran, and other nations that don’t have high oversight standards for biological research, according to a White House fact sheet. The directive is said to prevent the potential outbreak of another pandemic.
Gain-of-function research is defined as the modification of viruses for the purpose of making them more infectious or deadly for study in a laboratory.
The White House cited the bat coronavirus research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funded by EcoHealth Alliance as the primary reason for the executive action.
“It can leak out, like from Wuhan. . . . I think I said that right from Day One,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “I’ve never changed that opinion.”
The president was joined by National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, who in 2020 coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration opposing the widespread use of lockdowns to mitigate the pandemic, and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who was critical of lockdowns and Covid-19 vaccines at the height of the pandemic.
“There’s no laboratory that’s immune from leaks — and this is going to prevent those kinds of inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity,” Kennedy said, standing by Trump’s side. “The Covid outbreak cost 20 million lives and cost the world at least $25 trillion, and this executive order is a precaution against us being involved in that kind of research in the future.”
After Kennedy finished his remarks, Trump said he was “very honored” to sign the executive order.
The directive is said to protect Americans from similar inadvertent lab leaks, such as one that researchers believe may have caused the 1977 Russian flu.
The order contains enforcement and reporting mechanisms designed to strengthen biosafety and biosecurity oversight and to “discourage subjective interpretation of policies that researchers have used in the past,” the White House says.
Trump’s signing of the order comes after the FBI, Department of Energy, and CIA assessed that the coronavirus pandemic likely resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. The CIA backed the lab leak theory shortly after Trump took office in January, while the two other agencies made those assessments in February 2023.
Meanwhile, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins claimed that transmission of the coronavirus from animals to humans was the most plausible explanation for the global outbreak in 2020.
Representative James Comer (R., Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, applauded Trump’s move to ban gain-of-function research funded by American taxpayer dollars. Under the Oversight Committee, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic led a two-year investigation that involved congressional testimony from Fauci and Collins, both of whom conceded that the lab leak theory was not a conspiracy theory after all.
“Every American should be outraged that their hard-earned tax dollars were used by mad scientists to engineer more deadly and transmissible coronaviruses,” Comer said in a statement. “I applaud President Trump for banning taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research government-wide. This administration is working to ensure the health and safety of all Americans, and this decisive action could prevent the next pandemic from spilling out of a lab.”