The Trump administration is reportedly preparing an executive order curtailing funding of “gain-of-function” research on pandemic pathogens, in what would seem to be an effort to prevent the next pandemic from spilling out of a federally funded laboratory. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was hashing out the details of an order that would impose at least a temporary pause on funding of experiments that could make viruses more transmissible and or deadly. Proponents argue that this work is necessary for identifying future pandemic threats.
“People can bury their heads in the sand, but there are lots of viral threats out there, and you’re not going to be able to solve that threat without understanding viruses,” Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and biosafety expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told the Journal. Yet the Trump administration’s forthcoming pause would hardly be a novel initiative. The last three presidential administrations have all attempted to apply additional restrictions to gain-of-function research involving pandemic viruses over concerns that such research could cause a pandemic via lab accident or be used by nefarious actors to produce a bioweapon. In 2014, the Obama administration paused funding for certain gain-of-function experiments on SARS, MERS, and influenza viruses.
In 2017, the first Trump administration implemented a new policy that lifted the pause but required research proposals that could produce new pandemic pathogens to be forwarded to a committee within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for a risk-benefit analysis. In May 2024, the Biden administration issued a modified version of that 2017 policy that likewise required HHS review of risky pandemic research. Granted, none of these frameworks proved to be particularly effective at their intended aims of limiting federal funding for gain-of-function research. Under the Obama administration’s “pause,” the National Institutes of Health (NIH), through its subsidiary National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Proponents of the lab leak hypothesis argue that this NIH-funded research contributed to the creation of COVID-19 in the Wuhan laboratory, which then later leaked to the world and caused the pandemic. That research continued to be funded by NIH under the first Trump administration. The agency never sent this research to HHS for a department-level review, as would seem to have been required. All told, the HHS committee established under the Trump administration to vet gain-of-function research only ever reviewed three grant proposals and greenlit two of them. Critics point to this as evidence that NIH and NIAID, helmed by gain-of-function proponents Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci (the latter of whom had a long history of public statements opposing restrictions on gain-of-function research), were deliberately flouting this vetting system.
If personnel is policy, the second Trump administration’s pause on gain-of-function research will be more effective. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to helm HHS, published a book last year arguing COVID-19 was a bioweapon created in the Wuhan lab. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick for NIH director, has expressed openness to the more modest theory that COVID leaked accidentally from a lab. Before his nomination to head NIH, Bhattacharya served on the board of the anti-gain-of-function research group Biosafety Now. Both would play key roles in enforcing any forthcoming pause on federal funding of gain-of-function research and would presumably be more dutiful in that role than Collins of Fauci.