President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to ban all federal funding for “dangerous” gain-of-function research in “countries of concern,” such as China and Iran, and for research in foreign countries that is “likely to cause another pandemic.”
In a fact sheet accompanying the president’s executive order, the White House explained that Trump’s order 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 Fox News, gain-of-function research, which was conducted at the Wuhan Lab in China prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, usually involves the modification of a virus to make it stronger or more infectious.
“For decades, policies overseeing gain-of-function research on pathogens, toxins, and potential pathogens have lacked adequate enforcement, transparency, and top-down oversight,” the White House wrote in the fact sheet. “Researchers have not acknowledged the legitimate potential for societal harms that this kind of research poses.”
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The White House explained that the president has “long theorized that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and has consistently pushed for transparency in investigating its origins.”
Trump’s executive order will prohibit federal funding for “dangerous” gain-of-function research in “foreign nations deemed to have insufficient research oversight.” The White House emphasized that the order is intended to prevent “lab accidents and other biosecurity incidents,” while still allowing “productive biological research” designed to keep the United States prepared for “biological threats” and at the forefront of health and biosecurity research.
Trump described Monday’s executive order regarding gain-of-function research as a “big deal.”
“[It] could have been that we wouldn’t have had the problem we had if we had this done earlier,” Trump said.
Highlighting the potential dangers of gain-of-function research, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that while gain-of-function research has traditionally been defended as a tool to create vaccines to “counter a future pandemic,” “in all of the history of gain-of-function research, we can’t point to a single good thing that’s come from it.”
