Trump’s executive order dealing with a type of biomedical research comes at a time of heightened tensions with China over tariffs.
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- Trump halted biological research funding to adversaries such as China and Iran because of concerns COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump signed an executive order to halt federal funding for a type of biomedical research in China and Iran, aiming to prevent development of another pandemic like COVID-19.Trump and some federal agencies have long theorized that the pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which the Chinese deny.
“It can leak out innocently, stupidly and incompetently, and half destroy the world,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
His executive order targeted the elimination of what is called gain-of-function, which studies how viruses become more powerful. The U.S. funded that sort of research at the Wuhan lab, in the city where the initial outbreak was reported. But a competing theory is that a person somehow came into contact with an infected animal.
According to a White House, Trump’s order signed May 5 aims to:
- End any present and all future federal funding of gain-of-function research in countries of concern like China and Iran, which Trump deemed to have insufficient research oversight.
- Reduce the potential for lab-related incidents such as with bat coronaviruses in China.
- Protect Americans from lab accidents and other biosecurity incidents.
COVID-19 ‘probably emerged’ in China without government’s foreknowledge: U.S. intelligence
Gain-of-function research studies how pathogens such as avian influenza and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome can evolve to become more potent or contagious.
But determining the cause of COVID-19, which killed an estimated 7 million of people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and ground the worldwide economy to a halt, has been fraught politically because of tensions between the U.S. and China.
The U.S. intelligence community released an unclassified assessment that found the COVID-19 virus “probably emerged and infected humans” through a small exposure by November 2019, with the first cluster of cases in Wuhan, China. The agencies divided over whether the exposure could have come from a lab or from a natural exposure to an infected animal.
The intelligence community judged “the virus was not developed as a biological weapon” and that Chinese officials didn’t know about virus before the initial outbreak.
Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, told reporters in January that experts from the World Health Organization found it was “extremely unlikely” the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
“The U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once, and stop scapegoating others,” Ning said.
After signing the order, Trump recounted his theory on the origins of COVID-19, saying he believed from “day one” that it was caused from a lab leak in China. He suggested perhaps a scientist “walked outside to have lunch with a girlfriend or was together with a lot of people.”
“That’s how it leaked out, in my opinion, and I’ve never changed that opinion,” Trump said.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who was on hand as Trump signed the order, pointed to a leak from the Wuhan lab as a likely source for the pandemic.
“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. “And this executive order is precaution against us being involved in that kind of research in the future.”
Vaccine producers disagree on whether gain-of-function research is essential for vaccine development, so the National Institutes of Health said the contributions to vaccine development need careful evaluation. But Kennedy was skeptical.
“In all of the history of gain-of-function research, we cannot point to a single good thing that has come of it,” Kennedy said.