President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning funding on research that could lead to another pandemic.
The president signed the order Monday afternoon, which, as the White House said, “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.”
Fox News reported that gain-of-function research involves changing a virus to make it more infectious to humans. This is what happened at the Wuhan Lab before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The White House said this will be safer for accidents for Americans to avoid viruses “such as those that likely caused COVID-19 and the 1977 Russian flu.”
The U.S. will control federal funding where there is a lack of oversight.
“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 said in a fact sheet. “Researchers have not acknowledged the legitimate potential for societal harms that this kind of research poses.”
The order “protects Americans from dangerous gain-of-function research that manipulates viruses and other biological agents and toxins, but it does not impede productive biological research that will ensure the United States maintains readiness against biological threats and continues to drive global leadership in biotechnology, biosecurity, and health research.”
“President Trump 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,” per the White House.
