Gain Of Function

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday afternoon ending the allocation of federal funding toward risky gain-of-function research in foreign countries like China, where the Covid-19 pandemic is believed to have originated.

The order targets the funding of gain-of-function research conducted in “countries of concern,” including Iran, and other nations that don’t have high oversight standards for biological research, according to a White House fact sheet. The directive is said to prevent the potential outbreak of another pandemic.

In 2021, Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) got into a heated exchange over whether the National Institutes of Health funds gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It’s about time!

At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Asked by Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) whether an NIH grant to the Manhattan-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance supported the gain-of-function experiments, Tabak said, “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

A classified intelligence report recently delivered to Congress included the Energy Department's assessment that it is “likely” that Covid-19 first spread after a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, two sources with direct knowledge told NBC News.

With recent revelations about the Department of Energy now saying that COVID-19 most likely came from a lab leak, and Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and their own version of the COVID-19 select committee, the raging debate about COVID origins has come back to the forefront. 

White House spokespersons played the press corps like a Stradivarius on Monday as they ducked questions about Sunday’s report that the Energy Department has concluded the Covid virus probably originated in a Chinese laboratory.

“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how Covid started,” said John Kirby, the White House national-security spokesman. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.”

Senate Republicans demanded transparency and accountability in response to reports that the U.S. Energy Department concluded COVID-19 most likely originated from a Chinese lab leak.

The US Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.

Two sources said that the Department of Energy assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

A federal watchdog agency for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says in a report released this week that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) failed to carry out sufficient oversight into research conducted using millions in federal funds, including research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been aggressively scrutinized amid the coronavirus pandemic.