Biosafety hawks were initially optimistic that the incoming second Trump administration would at last place binding constraints on so-called “dangerous gain-of-function” research, in which pathogens are manipulated in laboratories to be more virulent or transmissible in humans.
The administration’s picks for top health policy jobs—most notably National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—are both gain-of-function critics who have asserted that this type of research created SARS-COV-2 in Wuhan, China.
In May, the White House issued an executive order creating a broader definition for dangerous gain-of-function research and promising that new restrictions on it would be issued within a few months.
“The conduct of this research does not protect us from pandemics. There’s always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out by accident even and cause a pandemic,” said Bhattacharya at the Oval Office press conference when the order was signed. With the order, “the public can say ‘no, don’t take this risk.'”
But the deadlines for the new restrictions called for in that order have since come and gone without any new policy being released. Meanwhile, there are indications that the NIH is continuing to fund risky virological research.
Gain-of-function critics who were optimistic that this research would finally be put back in the box are now concerned that the Trump administration will fail to implement meaningful restrictions.
“There was a promise to deliver these policies. It’s very disappointing to see that not emerge,” Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, tells Reason. Nickels briefly served as a contractor advising the NIH on new gain-of-function policy before being let go in August.
In his role as an NIH contractor, Nickels reviewed draft policies on gain-of-function research that the May executive order called for. He said that there was no practical reason why the White House shouldn’t have been able to meet its deadline to issue the new policy.
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which is responsible for issuing the new gain-of-function regulations called for in the May executive order, did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.
While arguments about COVID-19’s origins have polarized discussions about gain-of-function research, fears that it could cause a pandemic via a laboratory accident were once mainstream.
The past three presidential administrations issued policies imposing some restrictions on it. That included the 2014 “pause” on gain-of-function research involving MERS, SARS, and influenza viruses issued by the Obama administration.
This was followed by the implementation of a 2017 framework in the first Trump administration that allowed funding for gain-of-function research to start again, provided that the riskiest experiments received risk-benefit vetting by a department-level panel within HHS.
Finally, in 2024, the Biden administration issued a new framework on “dual-use research of concern” that was supposed to clarify when experiments involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential should receive that HHS-level review.
Critics have long argued that these policies failed to actually restrict the most dangerous gain-of-function experiments.
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