Trump signs executive order limits funding for controversial feature rewards research
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to limit federal funding for functional rewards studies that are used to study how pathogens become more harmful by causing mutations in the lab. The EO was signed by the president in the Oval Office of the White House, by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top health officials on Trump, who all tried to suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a leak from a research institute in China that is conducting access to functional studies. They falsely claim that the so-called laboratory leak theory is a consensus view among scientists.
Titled “Improving the Safety of Biological Research,” the executive order directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director to work with federal agencies to issue guidance to end federal funding for all functional studies in the United States and abroad. The order also instructs agents to track functional gains research in the United States that has not received federal funding and figure out how to stop it.
Research on functional benefits depends on trade-offs and has long been debated in the scientific community. Nature published a study that was criticized in 2012 at the time in the form of influenza in birds. This feels particularly relevant to the people of us who are currently outbreak of H5N1, which jumps to cattle but has not yet spread from human to human.
However, most debates surrounding functional gain research have nothing to do with the method of disclosure in scientific journals. As Gizmodo explained in 2014, the purpose of this study was to create a “preemptive strike” targeting potentially dangerous viruses to understand how it works. Although they have risks, they also have benefits. Being able to figure out how the virus mutates can give an early understanding of how to fight vaccines.
“Scientists can make almost every mutation, and nature has made it,” Virologist Patrick Moore, a University of Pittsburgh virologist, told Gizmodo in 2017.
But the risks are very real. President Barack Obama stopped funding for GOF research in 2014 after several safety lapses involving the deadly bugs, including anthrax from the CDC, smallpox from the FDA and Bird Flu from the USDA. NIH lifted the ban on functional rewards research in 2017 during the first term of President Trump.
Despite a real justifiable debate on dysfunction research and its role in safety, the press release held at the White House on Monday included many fierce claims that were more of a field of conspiracy theorists than seriously-thought health officials.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, standing near Trump, spoke to reporters as the president signed the EO, pushing for an exact narrative about the origins of Covid-19, but remains very controversial.
“Mr. President suggests it comes from a Wuhan laboratory, which is incredible to think that the entire Kuved nightmare may be preventable and that you have a good intuition early on,” Makary told Trump. “This is the main theory among scientists.”
Latest research on laboratory leak theory, studying genomic data, still suggests the origin of nature. Back in February, a study found that most virologists and other scientists with relevant expertise still do not consider laboratory leak theory the best explanation for how Covid-19 enters the world. But that doesn't match the close narrative that Trump and his people want to believe. Covid-19 is entirely possible due to a lab leak. We just don't have reliable data to support this idea, and anyone who uses this as a reason to ban functional reward research may try to sell you on a worldview that is less dependent on science, rather than relying more on ideology.
