WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order ending federal funding for gain-of-function research – which intentionally makes viruses more dangerous or transmissible – in China and other countries.
As White House staff secretary Will Scharf noted, gain-of-function research is believed to be responsible for creating the COVID-19 virus, which originated from Wuhan, where U.S.-funded gain-of-function research has been conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“It’s a big deal. It could have been that we wouldn’t have had the problem we had, if we had this done,” remarked Trump in reference to the COVID outbreak, before displaying the signed executive order in the Oval Office.
Trump signs Executive Order to end federal funding for gain-of-function virus research which many now believe caused the COVID pandemic. pic.twitter.com/mWKz2deuy3
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) May 5, 2025
As Conservative Treehouse has noted, gain-of-function research is essentially the “weaponization of biological agents.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has claimed that the purpose of the dangerous experimentation is to “enabl[e] assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents.”
The EO points out that unchecked gain-of-function research can lead to mass deaths, hinder the public health system, hurt livelihoods, and “diminis[h] economic and national security.” The order ends federal funding for gain-of-function research in China and other countries “where there is not adequate oversight” to ensure they comply with U.S. policy.
It also ends federal funding of “other life-science research” in countries without such sufficient oversight, “that could reasonably pose a threat to public health, public safety, and economic or national security[.]”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently acknowledged in an interview that gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab was coordinated and funded by the U.S. government and noted that the intelligence community is close to drawing a direct connection between this research and the release of the COVID-19 virus.
In 2021, Fox News’ Steve Hilton released a report compiling evidence of this. It detailed how Dr. Anthony Fauci had signed off on a program that included gain-of-function work with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In 2011, Fauci notably defended gain-of-function research in the Washington Post as “a risk a worth taking,” after more than 200 scientists called for a halt of gain-of-function trials with ferret viruses, citing the possibility of a deadly leak.
The White House and federal health officials temporarily banned funding or conducting gain-of-function activities in 2014, due to troubling incidents at U.S. laboratories, but the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance persisted in such research despite repeated warnings from National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials.
NIH officials repeatedly warned EcoHealth Alliance that its research violated the U.S. government “funding pause” on gain-of-function research, published emails have shown.
Nine hundred pages of documents obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act litigation in 2021 confirmed that the NIH was supporting GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from at least 2014 to 2019, despite the repeated warnings from NIH officials.