Trump’s executive order, which deals with a kind of biomedical research, is at a time when tensions with China over tariffs have risen.
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- Trump has suspended biological research funding for enemies such as China and Iran due to concerns about Covid-19 that was born in a Chinese lab.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to suspend federal funds for a kind of biomedical research in China and Iran, aiming to prevent the development of another pandemic, such as Covid-19.
Trump and several federal agencies have long theorized that the pandemic began at the Wuhan Virology Institute.
“It can leak innocently, foolishly, incompetently, and half of it could destroy the world,” Trump told White House reporters.
His executive order targeted the elimination of what is called gain of function. This is studying how viruses become more potent. The US funded such research at the Uhan Institute in the city where the first outbreak was reported. However, the competing theory is that a person somehow contacted an infected animal.
According to the White House, Trump’s order, signed on May 5, aims to:
- Ends current and all federal funding for gain-of-function research in countries of concern, such as China and Iran, where Trump thought research surveillance was inadequate.
- Reduces the possibility of lab-related incidents such as the Chinese bat coronavirus.
- Protects Americans from lab accidents and other biosecurity incidents.
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Gain of Function studies how pathogens such as avian influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome evolve to become more potent or contagious.
However, according to the World Health Organization, determining the cause of Covid-19, which killed an estimated 7 million people around the world, to shut down the global economy, was politically frugk due to tensions between the US and China.
The US intelligence reporting community published an uncategorized assessment by November 2019 that it believed “probably occurred, infected people emerged, and infected people emerged” through small-scale exposures. The agency split whether the exposure came from the lab or from natural exposure to infected animals.
The intelligence community determined that “the virus has not been developed as a biological weapon,” and Chinese officials determined they had no knowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak.
Mao Ning, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters in January that World Health Organization experts felt the pandemic was “very unlikely” caused by lab leaks.
“The US needs to stop politicization and tracking the origins of weapons at once, stopping scapegoing for others,” Nin said.
After signing the order, Trump spoke about his theory of the origins of Covid-19, saying he believes it was caused by a leak in China’s lab from “the first day.” He suggested that the scientist “was out to have lunch with his girlfriend and stayed with a lot of people.”
“That’s the way it leaked in my opinion and I’ve never changed that opinion,” Trump said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., director of Health and Human Services, who Trump had been on hand for signing the order, pointed to a leak from the Wuhan Institute as a possible source of information for the pandemic.
“There are no labs that are immune to leaks, which we intend to prevent such careless leaks from occurring in the future and putting humanity at risk,” Kennedy said. “And this executive order is a precaution against us for being involved in this type of research in the future.”
Vaccine producers disagree with whether gain-of-function research is essential to vaccine development, so the National Institutes of Health said that contributions to vaccine development require careful evaluation. However, Kennedy was skeptical.
“In all of the history of gain-of-function research, we can’t refer to the one good thing that it came,” Kennedy said.
