"This is a historic day,”
By Tyler Durden: President Donald Trump on Monday afternoon signed an
executive order stopping federal funding for dangerous gain-of-function
research in high-risk countries like China and Iran, as well as in
nations with insufficient research oversight. Joined in the
Oval Office by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and National Institutes of Health official Jay Bhattacharya, Trump
underscored his commitment to protecting America’s public health and
national security.

The
order equips U.S. research agencies to identify and terminate funding
for biological research—both ongoing and future—that could threaten
public safety or national security. It specifically targets federally
funded studies abroad that risk triggering another pandemic, focusing on
gain-of-function experiments like those conducted on bat coronaviruses
by the EcoHealth Alliance and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The
measure also seeks to shield Americans from lab accidents and
biosecurity incidents, such as those believed to have contributed to the
COVID-19 pandemic and the 1977 Russian flu.
“It’s a big deal,” Trump said of the order. “It could have been that we wouldn’t have had the problem we had.”