Health
Trump signs order to stop funding for gain-of-function research believed to have caused COVID
From LifeSiteNews
Gain-of-function research, which involves purposefully making viruses more dangerous, was carried out at the Wuhan lab and is believed to be responsible for the COVID virus.
President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order ending federal funding for gain-of-function research – which intentionally makes viruses more dangerous or transmissible – in China and other countries.
As White House staff secretary Will Scharf noted, gain-of-function research is believed to be responsible for creating the COVID-19 virus, which originated from Wuhan, where U.S.-funded gain-of-function research has been conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“It’s a big deal. It could have been that we wouldn’t have had the problem we had, if we had this done,” remarked Trump in reference to the COVID outbreak, before displaying the signed executive order in the Oval Office.
Trump signs Executive Order to end federal funding for gain-of-function virus research which many now believe caused the COVID pandemic. pic.twitter.com/mWKz2deuy3
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) May 5, 2025
As Conservative Treehouse has noted, gain-of-function research is essentially the “weaponization of biological agents.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has claimed that the purpose of the dangerous experimentation is to “enabl[e] assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents.”
The EO points out that unchecked gain-of-function research can lead to mass deaths, hinder the public health system, hurt livelihoods, and “diminis[h] economic and national security.” The order ends federal funding for gain-of-function research in China and other countries “where there is not adequate oversight” to ensure they comply with U.S. policy.
It also ends federal funding of “other life-science research” in countries without such sufficient oversight, “that could reasonably pose a threat to public health, public safety, and economic or national security[.]”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently acknowledged in an interview that gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab was coordinated and funded by the U.S. government and noted that the intelligence community is close to drawing a direct connection between this research and the release of the COVID-19 virus.
In 2021, Fox News’ Steve Hilton released a report compiling evidence of this. It detailed how Dr. Anthony Fauci had signed off on a program that included gain-of-function work with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In 2011, Fauci notably defended gain-of-function research in the Washington Post as “a risk a worth taking,” after more than 200 scientists called for a halt of gain-of-function trials with ferret viruses, citing the possibility of a deadly leak.
The White House and federal health officials temporarily banned funding or conducting gain-of-function activities in 2014, due to troubling incidents at U.S. laboratories, but the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance persisted in such research despite repeated warnings from National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials.
NIH officials repeatedly warned EcoHealth Alliance that its research violated the U.S. government “funding pause” on gain-of-function research, published emails have shown.
Nine hundred pages of documents obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act litigation in 2021 confirmed that the NIH was supporting GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from at least 2014 to 2019, despite the repeated warnings from NIH officials.
From the Fraser Institute
Canadians continue to endure long wait times for health care. And while waiting for care can obviously be detrimental to your health and wellbeing, it can also hurt your pocketbook.
In 2024, the latest year of available data, the median wait—from referral by a family doctor to treatment by a specialist—was 30 weeks (including 15 weeks waiting for treatment after seeing a specialist). And last year, an estimated 1.5 million Canadians were waiting for care.
It’s no wonder Canadians are frustrated with the current state of health care.
Again, long waits for care adversely impact patients in many different ways including physical pain, psychological distress and worsened treatment outcomes as lengthy waits can make the treatment of some problems more difficult. There’s also a less-talked about consequence—the impact of health-care waits on the ability of patients to participate in day-to-day life, work and earn a living.
According to a recent study published by the Fraser Institute, wait times for non-emergency surgery cost Canadian patients $5.2 billion in lost wages in 2024. That’s about $3,300 for each of the 1.5 million patients waiting for care. Crucially, this estimate only considers time at work. After also accounting for free time outside of work, the cost increases to $15.9 billion or more than $10,200 per person.
Of course, some advocates of the health-care status quo argue that long waits for care remain a necessary trade-off to ensure all Canadians receive universal health-care coverage. But the experience of many high-income countries with universal health care shows the opposite.
Despite Canada ranking among the highest spenders (4th of 31 countries) on health care (as a percentage of its economy) among other developed countries with universal health care, we consistently rank among the bottom for the number of doctors, hospital beds, MRIs and CT scanners. Canada also has one of the worst records on access to timely health care.
So what do these other countries do differently than Canada? In short, they embrace the private sector as a partner in providing universal care.
Australia, for instance, spends less on health care (again, as a percentage of its economy) than Canada, yet the percentage of patients in Australia (33.1 per cent) who report waiting more than two months for non-emergency surgery was much higher in Canada (58.3 per cent). Unlike in Canada, Australian patients can choose to receive non-emergency surgery in either a private or public hospital. In 2021/22, 58.6 per cent of non-emergency surgeries in Australia were performed in private hospitals.
But we don’t need to look abroad for evidence that the private sector can help reduce wait times by delivering publicly-funded care. From 2010 to 2014, the Saskatchewan government, among other policies, contracted out publicly-funded surgeries to private clinics and lowered the province’s median wait time from one of the longest in the country (26.5 weeks in 2010) to one of the shortest (14.2 weeks in 2014). The initiative also reduced the average cost of procedures by 26 per cent.
Canadians are waiting longer than ever for health care, and the economic costs of these waits have never been higher. Until policymakers have the courage to enact genuine reform, based in part on more successful universal health-care systems, this status quo will continue to cost Canadian patients.
Mackenzie Moir
Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
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