President Donald Trump’s executive order strengthening restrictions on gain-of-function research is a sensible step in his administration’s crusade for sanity. Signed Monday evening, the order seeks to clamp down on the risky research that modifies pathogens or toxins to enhance their ability to cause disease or spread more easily, which most authorities believe caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
A White House fact sheet claims the new order “empowers American research agencies to identify and end federal funding of other biological research that could pose a threat to American public health, public safety, or national security.”
This is a broader clampdown on gain-of-function research than was enacted by former President Barack Obama. Late in his second term, Obama announced a funding pause for some gain-of-function experiments on certain pathogens, including influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. But enforcement was limited, and the federal government continued to fund other gain-of-function research, including experiments at the Wuhan Institute for Virology with grants from Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health.
Trump’s executive order has real teeth. It bans all federal funding for gain-of-function research in “countries of concern” with insufficient research oversight, including China and Iran, prohibiting U.S. dollars from paying for any foreign research that could trigger a pandemic. It also authorizes the suspension of federal grants for researchers, institutions, or organizations that violate the ban, with violators facing a funding ban of up to five years.
Crucially, the Office of Science and Technology Policy will oversee compliance. The Biden administration changed how the federal government oversees potentially dangerous experiments, but the reform lacked oversight by an independent regulatory agency. OSTP oversight means enforcement will be centralized, which will close more loopholes than before.
The order will also halt domestic research into infectious pathogens until stricter policies are in place to ensure safety. Some critics, such as Kristin Matthews, a fellow in science and technology policy at Rice University, believe this makes the United States less prepared for the next pandemic.
“If we ban it, the next time another COVID virus comes through, we won’t have the data to quickly find new treatments, screening, and even preventative measures,” Matthews told NPR.
This is circular nonsense. COVID-19 originated in a lab that conducted risky gain-of-function research — a theory accepted by the FBI, CIA, Department of Energy’s elite “Z” division, and others — so it is clear that funding such experiments creates pandemics rather than helping us avoid them, as Matthews claims. Arrogance in the scientific community, which should have been checked long ago, insists on its own indispensability without regard for the safety and well-being of the communities it should serve.
The new director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, understands this well. Having been attacked and suffered severe professional and reputational damage for speaking out against the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic while teaching at Stanford University, Bhattacharya’s claims were validated over the years, including his skepticism of lockdowns, school closures, and high fatality rates. Now he, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is tasked with restoring trust in the scientific establishment and ensuring their powerful agencies comply with new oversight policies developed by the OSTP.
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“This is a historic day,” Bhattacharya said Monday. “The conduct of this research does not protect us against pandemics, as some people might say, it doesn’t protect us against other nations. There’s always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out, just by accident even, and cause a pandemic.”
Trump’s order isn’t anti-science, as his critics claim; it’s anti-catastrophe. With grown-ups such as Bhattacharya, America is at last wrestling science back to its proper place as a servant of the public, not its master, thus restoring trust lost during the COVID years.