President Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at shielding the American public from the dangers of gain-of-function research, including the type of controversial experimentation believed to have played a role in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The order immediately ends all current and future federal funding for high-risk gain-of-function research conducted in adversarial nations like China and Iran, as well as in any country deemed to lack adequate oversight of biological experiments.
It also gives American research agencies new authority to identify and terminate federal support for any biological research that poses a threat to public health, safety, or national security.
A key provision of the order blocks taxpayer funding from being used for foreign research that could lead to future pandemics. According to the administration, this measure is designed to prevent lab-related incidents such as those connected to the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which were involved in experiments on bat coronaviruses prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
The executive action also aims to reduce the risk of biosecurity failures, referencing both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1977 Russian flu as examples of the potential consequences of unsafe laboratory research.
Read the Executive Order
