President Trump is set to issue an executive order cutting off all federal dollars from funding gain-of-function research in nations like China and Iran, unless those experiments are under stringent supervision. This move comes more than five years after the outbreak of COVID-19, which U.S. intelligence agencies now believe likely stemmed from a mishap in a laboratory.
The directive will apply retroactively and prospectively, stopping support for any current or upcoming gain-of-function studies. It will also task the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies with flagging biological research that could endanger public health or pose a threat to national security.
“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 reviewed by The Post.
Officials from the White House took aim at the Biden administration for failing to prevent controversial experiments that deliberately boost the contagiousness of pathogens, warning that such research could trigger global health disasters.
The executive order also halts all projects involving dangerous microbes or toxins until a revamped national policy is crafted. That new framework will be drawn up by the national security adviser and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and it will include strict enforcement and reporting mechanisms.
Since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, which has claimed the lives of over one million Americans, intense debate has raged among government agencies, lawmakers, and scientists over whether the virus originated from gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that received U.S. taxpayer money.
Between 2014 and 2021, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — then overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci — and the U.S. Agency for International Development provided over $1.4 million in grants and subgrants to EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Chinese lab on a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
That initiative led to what Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the former principal deputy director of the NIH, acknowledged were gain-of-function experiments conducted at the Wuhan facility. However, he and other officials have consistently denied that the project directly led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A growing number of federal agencies — including the FBI, the Energy Department, and the CIA — along with former high-ranking health experts like former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, have since concluded that a lab leak is the most plausible cause of the virus’s origin.
{Matzav.com}