Curb on virus research ordered

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — US President Donald Trump on Monday ordered new limitations on a form of biological research his administration says caused the Covid-19 pandemic through a lab leak in China.

The US will halt funding in certain countries for so-called “gain-of-function” experiments — aimed at enhancing the properties of pathogens — according to an executive order Trump signed Monday at the White House.

“There’s no laboratory that’s immune from leaks — and this is going to prevent inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote on X.

“Any nation that engages in this research endangers their own population, as well as the world, as we saw during the Covid pandemic,” added Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health.

Trump has long championed the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a result of gain-of-function research — an alternative to the theory that the virus spilled over naturally from wild animals to humans at a seafood market in the same city.

The US government website Covid.gov, which previously focused on promoting vaccine and testing information, is now devoted to highlighting arguments that favor the lab leak.

Several US agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Energy, and, most recently, the Central Intelligence Agency — which shifted its stance under Trump’s second term — now lean toward a lab origin.