Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Newsmax that President Donald Trump’s recent executive order halting the use of federal funds for gain-of-function research marks a turning point in scientific and public health policy.
“Gain of function is an area of science where scientists really play God,” Kennedy said on The Record With Greta Van Susteren. “And they’re taking pathogenic viruses and they’re making them more transmissible, they’re making them more virulent, and they’re making them more deadly.”
According to Kennedy, Trump’s move redirects government-funded scientific efforts toward improving health outcomes rather than enabling dangerous experimentation. “President Trump wants to have our federally funded scientists actually improving public health, ending chronic disease, fighting infectious diseases rather than creating new ones. And yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order to ban dangerous gain-of-function studies in this country and prevent us from funding those studies abroad. And I think it was a milestone, a historic development. I’m very grateful to President Trump for doing that.”
Kennedy explained that such controversial research has its roots in America’s post-World War II biological weapons program, which started in 1947. That program, he said, was brought to an end by President Richard Nixon in 1969, who ordered the destruction of the nation’s biological arsenal and limited future efforts to purely defensive projects like vaccines and detection systems, as noted by the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Nixon also led the U.S. in promoting the international Biological Weapons Convention, a United Nations treaty ratified by the Senate in 1972 and later joined by 187 countries.
Kennedy went on to criticize Dr. Anthony Fauci for bringing gain-of-function research back to life in 2001 in the wake of the anthrax attacks in the United States. He suggested Fauci’s efforts reignited global interest in offensive biological capabilities.
While the Obama administration instituted a temporary freeze on such research in 2014, that moratorium was lifted in late 2017 by the National Institutes of Health to permit studies involving viruses like influenza, SARS, and MERS. Kennedy pointed out that the outbreak of COVID-19 has been linked to a possible leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses.
“Gain of function studies and bioweapons development was forbidden by the bioweapons charter,” Kennedy said. “Nixon did something really extraordinary. He went to Fort Detrick [in Maryland] in 1969 and said, ‘We’re unilaterally stopping all bioweapons development.’ And then he got 180 countries to sign the bioweapons convention [treaty]. Bioweapons and gain-of-function science stopped between 1973 and 2001.”
Kennedy argued that once Fauci resumed this type of research, it triggered a new international arms race in biological weaponry. “When Anthony Fauci began launching these studies again in 2001, after the anthrax attacks, it precipitated an entire bioweapons arms race across the globe, and the Chinese are now deep into this. Russia is deep into it, Iran, and many other countries.”
He cited a warning issued by Henry Kissinger in 1969, who called this kind of work “the poor man’s atom bomb.”
Kennedy warned of the risks posed by new technologies that make it easier to carry out such experiments. “Anybody can make this stuff, particularly now with AI technology and CRISPR technology,” he said, referencing genetic editing tools and artificial intelligence. “They can make it in their garage if they have the blueprint.”
According to Kennedy, the publication of these research methods by government-funded scientists posed an existential threat. “And these scientists, the federally funded scientists, were creating the blueprint and then publishing them, and they were just how-to manuals about how to destroy humanity. It was really insane what we were doing.”
He concluded by reiterating his appreciation for Trump’s action: “And I’m very, very grateful for President Trump for putting an end to it in this country. And we’re looking forward to his leadership around the world and getting other countries also to ban it.”
{Matzav.com}