Trump Signs Executive Order to Limit Funding for Controversial Gain-of-Function Research

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that seeks to limit federal funding for gain-of-function research, which is used to study how pathogens can become more harmful by causing mutations in the lab. The EO was signed by the president in the Oval Office of the White House, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top health officials by Trump’s side, who all tried to suggest the covid-19 pandemic originated from a leak at a research facility in China that was conducting gain-of-function research. They falsely claimed the so-called lab leak theory was the consensus view among scientists.

Titled “Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research,” the executive order directs the White House’s Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to work with federal agencies to issue guidance that will end federal funding of all gain-of-function research in the U.S. and abroad. The order also directs agencies to track gain-of-function research in the U.S. that isn’t federally funded and figure out how to stop it.

Gain-of-function research has trade-offs and has long been debated in the scientific community. The journal Nature published a study about how to create a mutant form of a bird flu in 2012 that was criticized at the time. And that feels especially relevant to those of us living through the current H5N1 outbreak that’s jumped to cows and isn’t yet transmissible from human to human.

But most of the debate around gain-of-function research has nothing to do with disclosing methods in scientific journals. The research is conducted to create a kind of “pre-emptive strike” against potentially dangerous viruses to learn how they work, as Gizmodo explained in 2014. And while they have risks, they also have benefits. Being able to figure out how viruses could mutate allows for an early understanding of how to fight them with vaccines.

“Just about every mutation scientists can make, nature has already made,” Patrick Moore, virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told Gizmodo in 2017. “That’s something we should be aware of, and that’s why we have new viruses cropping up all the time.”

But the risks are very real. President Barack Obama halted funding for GOF research in 2014 after several security lapses involving lethal bugs, including anthrax at the CDC, smallpox at the FDA, and bird flu at the USDA. The NIH lifted a ban on gain-of-function research in late 2017 during President Trump’s first term.

While there’s real reasonable debate about the role of gain-of-function research and its safety, the press event at the White House on Monday included a lot of highly contested claims that are more the realm of conspiracy theorists than serious-minded health officials.

FDA commissioner Marty Makary, who was standing near Trump and Secretary Kennedy to talk with reporters as the president signed the EO, pushed a definitive narrative about the origins of covid-19 that is still very controversial.

“It’s unbelievable to think the entire nightmare of covid was likely preventable, and you had good instincts early on, Mr. President, in suggesting it came from the Wuhan lab,” Makary told Trump. “That is now the leading theory among scientists.”

The most recent studies on the lab leak theory, looking at genomic data, still suggest natural origins. Back in February, one study found that most virologists and other scientists with relevant expertise still don’t think the lab leak theory is the best explanation for how covid-19 came into the world. But that doesn’t fit with the tight narrative that Trump and his people want to believe. It’s entirely possible that covid-19 was caused by a lab leak. We just don’t have the solid data to support that idea and anyone using that as a rationale for banning gain-of-function research is probably trying to sell you on a worldview that relies less on science and more on ideology.