Latest news with #gainoffunction
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Terrifying hidden detail in Trump's popular new executive order sparks fears of another pandemic
Many celebrated when President Donald Trump signed a new executive order this week restricting research that could trigger the next pandemic. The order banned US funds from being used to sponsor research abroad known as 'gain-of-function', when pathogens are deliberately made more infectious or deadly. 'It's a big deal', said the President, while putting pen to paper in a White House briefing Monday, 'It could have been that we wouldn't have had the problem we had if we had this done earlier'. But a closer look at the fine-print of the order suggests it does not go as far as the full-scale ban on the research that many had hoped for. Trump's executive only bans federal funds from being used in 'countries of concern' like China and Iran. In the US and other allied countries, it allows federal funding of the work to continue — but proposes more monitoring from the US government. Thomas Renz, a vaccine-skeptic lawyer and supporter of Trump, claims the new policy doesn't end gain-of-function. He says it 'codifies it.' He told The Daily Pulse: 'They're going to allow it under new regulations. And by doing that, they're essentially saying, "We're fine with gain-of-function as long as it follows the current rules." 'So in that way, they're actually legitimizing gain-of-function work in this country, which is absolutely mind-blowing to me,' he added. Donald Trump is pictured above preparing to sign the executive order on gain-of-function research. He is flanked by his secretary for health Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the head of the NIH, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, and the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr Mehmet Oz. White House Secretary Will Scharf is shown handing the President the order Trump signed the executive order in a 20-minute session in the White House Monday flanked by the HHS secretary as well as the head of the NIH, Dr Jay Bhattacharya and the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Dr Mehmet Oz. A copy of the order posted online reads: 'The Biden Administration allowed dangerous gain-of-function research within the United States with insufficient levels of oversight. 'It also actively approved, through the National Institutes of Health, Federal life-science research funding in China and other countries where there is limited United States oversight or reasonable expectation of biosafety enforcement.' It continued: 'This recklessness, if unaddressed, may lead to the proliferation of research on pathogens (and potential pathogens) in settings without adequate safeguards, even after Covid-19 revealed the risk of such practices.' Your browser does not support iframes. It also asks the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, to come up with new guidelines for monitoring the research in the next 120 days. In 2014 under the Obama administration, all federal funding on experiments that could make certain viruses more dangerous was halted. Trump reversed this ban in 2017, allowing the experiments to continue — although under a very tight framework. After the Covid pandemic, however, last year the Biden administration brought in a sweeping set of federal laws for monitoring the research. The new order seeks to build on this Biden era framework, and come up with a new method for monitoring the experiments. Biden's move has already faced criticism for failing to set up an independent federal agency to monitor the research.
Fox News
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Trump's Latest Big Moves
As seen on Gutfeld!, Greg makes fun of Fauci and the media after Trump's recent ban on federal funding for gain-of-function research. Plus, Greg calls out the Dems and the media for turning a blind eye to illegal immigration during Trump's new self-deportation policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
Daily Mail
06-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
RFK Jr. eviscerates Dr. Fauci for trying to start a bioweapons arms race in Chinese lab: 'His bugs escaped'
Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. condemned Dr. Anthony Fauci for expanding 'gain of function' research on bioweapons outside the United States during an interview on Fox News on Monday. Gain of function research is focused on making pathogens more transmissible and more deadly for the use of developing bioweapons and developing vaccines and treatments to combat it. Kennedy revealed in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that despite President Richard Nixon's efforts to shut down bioweapons labs in 1969, Fauci effectively restarted programs overseas. 'Anthony Fauci began essentially restarted the arms race and the bioweapons arms race, and did it under the pretension of developing vaccines, because of the same science that you develop bioweapons and vaccines,' he said. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday, banning gain-of-function research. Kennedy claimed that 'three of his bugs escaped' out Fauci's labs in the United States in 2014 prompting 300 scientists to rally and sign a letter urging President Barack Obama to end the experiments. 'President Obama declared a moratorium, but instead of shutting down his experiments, he moved them offshore, mainly to the Wuhan lab,' Kennedy said, referring to Fauci's indirect funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the federal government. The Wuhan lab is widely considered to be the source of the coronavirus pandemic that came from China. 'The CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Energy -- all say that it is most likely that those experiments resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic in -- beginning in 2019,' Kennedy said. The HHS secretary praised Trump for signing a ban on gain-of-function research in the Oval Office on Monday. Kennedy also weighed in on President Joe Biden's eleventh hour pardon of Fauci just hours before he left the presidency. 'I don't know what was going on in Joe Biden's head, but I think that Anthony Fauci probably asked for that pardon, knowing that he had some liabilities here that were more than reputational,' Kennedy said. Trump signed his executive order banning funding for gain of function research on Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, as Kennedy stood beside him. 'It's a big deal, could have been that we wouldn't have had the problem we had if we had this done earlier,' Trump said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic. Kennedy said during the signing event that Fauci's research on viruses and bioweapons created an 'arms race' that Russia, China, and Iran. 'It's a kind of weapon that always has blowback. There's always bad news and the justification for this kind of weaponry and this kind of research was always that we have to do this to develop vaccines to counter a future pandemic,' he said. 'In all of the history of gain of function research we cannot point to a single good thing that's come from it.'
Gizmodo
06-05-2025
- Health
- Gizmodo
Trump Signs Executive Order to Limit Funding for Controversial Gain-of-Function Research
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that seeks to limit federal funding for gain-of-function research, which is used to study how pathogens can become more harmful by causing mutations in the lab. The EO was signed by the president in the Oval Office of the White House, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top health officials by Trump's side, who all tried to suggest the covid-19 pandemic originated from a leak at a research facility in China that was conducting gain-of-function research. They falsely claimed the so-called lab leak theory was the consensus view among scientists. Titled 'Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research,' the executive order directs the White House's Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to work with federal agencies to issue guidance that will end federal funding of all gain-of-function research in the U.S. and abroad. The order also directs agencies to track gain-of-function research in the U.S. that isn't federally funded and figure out how to stop it. Gain-of-function research has trade-offs and has long been debated in the scientific community. The journal Nature published a study about how to create a mutant form of a bird flu in 2012 that was criticized at the time. And that feels especially relevant to those of us living through the current H5N1 outbreak that's jumped to cows and isn't yet transmissible from human to human. But most of the debate around gain-of-function research has nothing to do with disclosing methods in scientific journals. The research is conducted to create a kind of 'pre-emptive strike' against potentially dangerous viruses to learn how they work, as Gizmodo explained in 2014. And while they have risks, they also have benefits. Being able to figure out how viruses could mutate allows for an early understanding of how to fight them with vaccines. 'Just about every mutation scientists can make, nature has already made,' Patrick Moore, virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told Gizmodo in 2017. 'That's something we should be aware of, and that's why we have new viruses cropping up all the time.' But the risks are very real. President Barack Obama halted funding for GOF research in 2014 after several security lapses involving lethal bugs, including anthrax at the CDC, smallpox at the FDA, and bird flu at the USDA. The NIH lifted a ban on gain-of-function research in late 2017 during President Trump's first term. While there's real reasonable debate about the role of gain-of-function research and its safety, the press event at the White House on Monday included a lot of highly contested claims that are more the realm of conspiracy theorists than serious-minded health officials. FDA commissioner Marty Makary, who was standing near Trump and Secretary Kennedy to talk with reporters as the president signed the EO, pushed a definitive narrative about the origins of covid-19 that is still very controversial. 'It's unbelievable to think the entire nightmare of covid was likely preventable, and you had good instincts early on, Mr. President, in suggesting it came from the Wuhan lab,' Makary told Trump. 'That is now the leading theory among scientists.' The most recent studies on the lab leak theory, looking at genomic data, still suggest natural origins. Back in February, one study found that most virologists and other scientists with relevant expertise still don't think the lab leak theory is the best explanation for how covid-19 came into the world. But that doesn't fit with the tight narrative that Trump and his people want to believe. It's entirely possible that covid-19 was caused by a lab leak. We just don't have the solid data to support that idea and anyone using that as a rationale for banning gain-of-function research is probably trying to sell you on a worldview that relies less on science and more on ideology.
