The Trump government is reportedly preparing an Implementation Decree that the financing of 'gain-of-function' investigation into pandemic pathogens limits in what an attempt seems to be to prevent the following pandemic from coming from a federally financed laboratory.
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House brought out the details of an order that at least a temporary break would impose on the financing of experiments that could make viruses more transferable and/or more fatal.
Proponents claim that this work is necessary for identifying future pandemic threats.
“People can put their heads in the sand, but there are many viral threats, and you will not be able to solve that threat without understanding the viruses,” says Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and bio -safety expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg. School of Public Health told the Magazine.
Yet the upcoming break of the Trump government would certainly not be a new initiative.
The last three presidential governments have all tried to impose additional restrictions on research into 'gain-of-function' research involving pandemic viruses, due to the concern that such research could cause a pandemic via a laboratory accident or by node actors can be used to produce a biowapen.
In 2014, the Obama government stopped financing for certain gain-of-function experiments with sars, mers and flu viruses.
In 2017, the first Government Trump introduced a new policy that caused the break, but required research proposals that could produce new pandemic pathogens, had to be forwarded to a committee within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for a risk Benetry analysis.
In May 2024, the Biden government released a changed version of that policy from 2017, which also requires a HHS assessment of risky pandemic investigation.
Admittedly, none of these frameworks turned out to be particularly effective in the intended goal, namely limiting federal financing for gain-or-function research.
Under the 'break' of the Obama government, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) financed through its subsidiary National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), 'Gain-of-Function' study into bat coronairuses at the Wuhan Institute or Virology.
Proponents of the Laboratory Lekhypothesis claim that this research has contributed to the creation of COVID-19 in the Wuhan laboratory, which later leaked to the world and caused the pandemic.
That research was still financed by the NIH under the first Trump government. The agency never sent this research to HHS for an assessment at departmental level, as necessary.
All in all, the HHS committee established under the Trump government to investigate research into profit-or-function investigation, assessed only three subsidy proposals and given two of them of the green light.
Critics point to this as proof that nih and niaid, assisted by proponents of 'gain-of-function' Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci (of whom the latter had a long history of public statements that opposed disabilities on 'gain- or function 'examination), intentionally ignored the law. This inspection system.
If staff is the policy, the break of the second government Trump in the field of gain-of-function research will be more effective.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's candidate to Leiden HHS, published a book last year in which he claimed that COVID-19 was a biowapen that was made in the Wuhan laboratory.
Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's choice for NIH director, has expressed his openness for the more modest theory that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory. Before his appointment as head of the NIH, Bhattacharya was a member of the board of the anti-gain-or function research group Biosafety Now.
Both would play a key role in enforcing a coming break in the federal financing of gain-of-function research and would probably be more detailed in that role than Fauci Collins.
The message that Trump is said to be preparing an executive order for prohibiting the federal financing of research into 'gain-of-function' appeared for the first time on Reason.com.
