President Donald Trump has taken decisive action to protect Americans from another devastating pandemic by cutting off funding to dangerous virus research in China and Iran.
The executive order puts America first by halting U.S. taxpayer dollars from funding the very research that likely sparked the COVID-19 pandemic through a Chinese lab leak.
The presidential order specifically targets gain-of-function research, which involves experimenting with viruses to make them more potent or contagious.
President Trump’s directive prevents federal funds from supporting such potentially catastrophic research in nations with inadequate safety oversight, particularly China and Iran.
“It can leak out innocently, stupidly and incompetently, and half destroy the world,” President Trump stated during the signing ceremony.
He also doubled down on his long-held stance that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in China.
The order aims to protect Americans from future biosecurity incidents by reducing the risk of lab-related accidents.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. strongly endorsed the executive order, highlighting the clear dangers these experiments pose to humanity.
“There’s no laboratory that’s immune from leaks, and this is going to prevent those kind of inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity,” Kennedy stated.
The order specifically empowers U.S. research agencies to terminate funding for biological research that poses threats to public health or national security.
Jay Bhattacharya, the newly appointed National Institutes of Health director, praised the executive order.
He said, “Any nation that engages in this research endangers their own population, as well as the world, as we saw during the COVID pandemic.”
Chinese officials predictably rejected any suggestion of responsibility. Foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning claimed it is “extremely unlikely” the pandemic resulted from a lab leak.
“The U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once, and stop scapegoating others,” she insisted, despite growing evidence to the contrary.
Several U.S. agencies, including the FBI and CIA, now lean toward a lab origin theory for COVID-19.
The White House has updated the government website related to COVID to highlight evidence supporting the lab leak explanation.
The NIH previously funded bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a grant that was later partially restored under Joe Biden.
Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci has repeatedly disputed claims that this research met the technical definition of gain-of-function, despite evidence suggesting otherwise.
By signing this executive order, President Trump has delivered on his promise to hold China accountable and protect Americans from dangerous foreign practices that threatened global health security and cost millions of lives during the pandemic.
