President Trump will sign an executive order on Monday that will ban all federal funding for high-risk gain-of-function research that is being conducted in China, Iran, and other nations which lack adequate supervision of such experiments, according to a new report.
This decision comes more than five years after the Covid-19 outbreak, which U.S. intelligence agencies now believe most likely originated from a laboratory accident in China. The order will immediately cut off funding from "any present and all future" gain-of-function studies. It will also authorize the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal bodies to monitor and flag biological research that could endanger public health to national security.
Trump Puts and End to Research on Covid
"These measures will drastically reduce the potential for lab-related incidents involving gain-of-function research, like that conducted on bat coronaviruses in China by the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology," according to a White House fact sheet that was obtained by The New York Post.
White House officials also slammed the Biden administration for allowing experiments that increase the transmissibility of viruses and bacteria—research they claim could potentially trigger another global pandemic, the outlet reported.
Since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2—which has claimed the lives of over 1 million Americans—government officials, lawmakers, and scientists have continued to debate whether the virus originated from gain-of-function research funded by the U.S. at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Between 2014 and 2021, the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), then led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), directed more than $1.4 million in grants and subawards to the Chinese lab via EcoHealth Alliance for a project called "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence."
Stopping All Kinds of Risks to Humans
This led to what former NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak acknowledged were gain-of-function experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, he and other officials have maintained that there is no direct connection between those experiments and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The FBI, Department of Energy, and CIA — along with former health leaders such as former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield — later pointed to a laboratory leak as the most probable origin of the outbreak.
