Trump signs order that protects US from pandemic on scale of COVID-19
Donald Trump, President of the US (photo: Getty Images)
The US will no longer fund research involving viruses that could potentially trigger a pandemic, according to Bloomberg and CNN.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at restricting federal funding for gain-of-function research — experiments that involve altering pathogens to study their potential to become more dangerous. Trump suggested that such research might have been linked to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It could have been that we didn’t have the problem we had,” Trump told reporters Monday during the signing ceremony at the White House.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies to identify and terminate any biological research that could pose a threat to public health in the US. The White House announced that future federal funding for research involving viruses with pandemic potential will also be prohibited, though the full scope of the ban remains unclear.
While the origin of the coronavirus pandemic is still undetermined, some US intelligence agencies have concluded that COVID-19 likely originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Researchers there - and in other labs around the world - have used both selective breeding and genetic engineering to make viruses more transmissible, arguing that such research is valuable for developing vaccines and understanding pathogen behavior.
“There’s no laboratory that does this right, there’s no laboratory that’s immune from leaks,” said US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “This is going to prevent these kind of inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity.”
Congressional committees controlled by Republicans have asserted that a lab leak is the most likely source of the pandemic and have urged the administration to impose a full ban on gain-of-function research.
The executive order is part of a broader set of health-related measures Trump signed on Monday.
Tariffs on imported medicines
President Donald Trump has announced another executive order - details of which have not yet been disclosed by the White House - aimed at boosting domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing. The move is part of a broader push to reduce the United States' reliance on foreign-made medications.
On Monday, Trump also threatened to impose new tariffs on drugs produced overseas, saying the goal is to encourage their production within the US. “The announcement would come within two weeks,” he said.
Additionally, the former president promised another announcement in the coming days focused on lowering the cost of prescription drugs.
“We’re going have a big announcement next week on some of this kind of thing, but more related to costs, the cost of medicines and drugs because we’re being ripped off,” Trump said.
US position on the origin of COVID-19
In April, the CIA identified a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the most likely origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, Chinese authorities have dismissed this theory as highly improbable.
Back in December, the World Health Organization (WHO) urged China to release all relevant data on COVID-19 to help determine the true origin of the virus.
