In a massive effort to prevent an event like the COVID-19 pandemic from ever happening again, President Donald Trump shut down dangerous virus research.
A recent executive order blocks U.S. federal funding for controversial “gain-of-function” experiments in countries with poor oversight, particularly China and Iran.
This decisive action delivers on the president’s promise to hold accountable those responsible for the virus that devastated America and the world.
The order specifically targets research that enhances dangerous pathogens’ ability to spread or cause harm.
Gain-of-function experiments involve manipulating viruses to study how they might evolve to cause pandemics.
This is the exact type of research many experts believe led to the COVID-19 outbreak when a lab-engineered virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“It can leak out innocently, stupidly and incompetently, and half destroy the world,” President Trump stated during the signing ceremony, emphasizing the global threat posed by such research.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long warned about risky biomedical research, strongly supported the order.
“There’s no laboratory that’s immune from leaks, and this is going to prevent those kind of inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity,” Kennedy said.
The new directive empowers U.S. agencies to immediately terminate funding for biological research that threatens public health or national security.
Unlike the Biden administration, which restored funding to the Wuhan Institute after President Trump initially cut it, the new order creates stronger safeguards against dangerous foreign labs receiving American taxpayer dollars.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the newly appointed National Institutes of Health director, praised the action.
He stated, “Any nation that engages in this research endangers their own population, as well as the world, as we saw during the COVID pandemic.”
While the Chinese government continues to deny responsibility for the pandemic, U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI and CIA, have concluded that a lab origin is the most likely explanation for COVID-19’s emergence.
The Trump administration has updated the government website about COVID to include evidence supporting the lab leak theory.
White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf highlighted the importance of the order.
He noted that “Many people believe that gain-of-function research was one of the key causes of the COVID pandemic that struck us in the last decade.”
Some scientists oppose the funding restriction, claiming it could hinder pandemic preparedness.
However, microbiologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University countered: “If one of these pathogens is released accidentally or if they are released deliberately, they can cause pandemics.”
The executive order represents a crucial step in preventing another devastating pandemic while holding accountable those responsible for COVID-19.
By stopping American tax dollars from funding dangerous experiments in untrustworthy foreign labs, President Trump has taken concrete action to protect Americans from future biological threats.
