Trump bans federal funding for potentially harmful viruses research

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that bans federal funding for gain-of-function research that typically enhances pathogens, RIA Novosti reported.

According to a press release posted on the White House website in conjunction with the executive order, the President's order is meant to "protect Americans from lab accidents and other biosecurity incidents, such as those that likely caused COVID-19."

"This executive order ends any present and all future Federal funding of dangerous gain-of-function research in countries of concern like China and Iran, empowers American research agencies to identify and end Federal funding of other biological research that could pose a threat to American public health, public safety, or national security," the publication said.

As the press release emphasizes, President Trump has long theorized that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Last December, U.S. congressmen said after a two-year investigation that the coronavirus was most likely of laboratory origin and had spread through a leak, according to a report released by the lawmakers. The report notes that "the COVID-19 virus is most likely to have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China."

WHO in March 2021 published the full version of the report of the organization's international team of experts on the visit to Wuhan to establish the origin of the coronavirus, in which the specialists called its leakage from the laboratory "highly unlikely". The report also said that a new type of coronavirus was most likely transmitted to humans from bats through another animal. The other version of the coronavirus's origin - direct transmission to humans from an animal - was listed by experts as a hypothesis "from possible to probable." The WHO mission also called "possible" the transmission of the virus through refrigerated food.