From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

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.

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 Daily Caller News Foundation

By EMILY KOPP

The National Institutes of Health has closed the last remaining intramural beagle lab conducting painful experiments — the federal government’s largest dog lab — NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said in a television interview Sunday.

A project at the NIH Clinical Center on “stress-induced and sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy” represented the final in-house experiments that induced pain and distress in beagles, classified under U.S. Department of Agriculture pain categories D and E. The project has now been terminated.

“We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on NIH campus,” Bhattacharya said on Fox & Friends Weekend.

“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans,” Bhattacharya said. “So we put forward a policy to replace animals in research with technological advances, AI and other tools, that actually translate better to human health.”

(RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Email Exposes How Boss Of NIH-Funded Alzheimer’s ‘Amyloid Mafia’ Shakes Down Critics)

NIH confirmed the news in a post on X.

Watch @NIHDirector_Jay on @FoxNews with @RCamposDuffy where he discusses a new NIH initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including getting rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus. pic.twitter.com/qfL5oepOBX

— NIH (@NIH) May 4, 2025

The NIH has killed 2,133 beagles in septic shock experiments since 1986, according to a nine-year investigation and advocacy campaign by White Coat Waste Project. Necroposy reports from 41 beagles and other veterinary records obtained by the group through the Freedom of Information Act show that the experiments involved infecting the beagles’ lungs with pneumonia-causing bacteria to induce sepsis and sometimes bleeding them out to induce hemorrhagic shock. The dogs are then euthanized.

Beagles have been used in medical experiments because of their docile temperament. The issue garnered the attention of many on social media and in Congress in 2021 when White Coat Waste revealed evidence that NIH exported $375,800 to a Tunisian lab for experiments that induced sand flies to feed on beagles locked in cages in order to study leishmaniasis. White House Chief Medical Advisor and longtime NIH official Anthony Fauci was flooded with phone calls.

“As the watchdog that first uncovered and battled Dr. Fauci’s beagle tests (the biggest animal testing scandal in history), we’re proud that White Coat Waste has closed the NIH’s last in-house beagle laboratory—and the US government’s biggest dog lab,” said White Coat Waste Project Founder Anthony Bellotti in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We applaud the President for cutting this wasteful NIH spending and will keep fighting until we defund all dog labs at home and abroad.”

NIH sourced beagles from contractor Envigo. Envigo reached a plea agreement in June 2024 to pay a $11 million fine for violating the Animal Welfare Act as part of a larger $35.5 million settlement, the largest-ever fine in an Animal Welfare Act case, according to the US Attorney’s Office. Inspections of a Virginia breeding facility revealed the dogs were stuffed in overcrowded kennels filled with feces and fed non-potable drinking water and rotten food.

The NIH announced on April 29 an initiative to shift away from animal experimentation toward less cruel methods more directly relevant to human health such as organoids, organs-on-a-chip, computing modeling and real-world data.

NIH made several commitments as a part of that effort, including establishing the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application within Bhattacharya’s office to help scale non-animal approaches; publishing annual data on the reduction in funding for animal studies; offering more training in non-animal approaches and integrating that expertise into the study sections that make determinations about NIH extramural grants.

As recently as April 15, a longtime NIH official had defended the beagle experiments, saying that “current canine models of sepsis offer several advantages in research, including similar cardiovascular anatomy and the ability to induce sepsis through mechanisms that mimic what occurs in humans,” according to an email from NIH to congressional aides shared with the DCNF.