WASHINGTON — Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) moved Wednesday to prohibit federal grants going toward all “dangerous” gain-of-function research on viruses, according to a copy of the legislation exclusively obtained by The Post.
The Dangerous Viral Gain-of-Function Research Moratorium Act would bar taxpayer money from contributing to any experiments involving the “genetic alteration” of viruses, bacteria or other toxins that enhances their transmissibility or infectiousness.
President Trump is also reportedly mulling an executive order banning the risky viral research, which has become a flash point in public health debates following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CIA, FBI, Energy Department, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield and other government scientists have all determined that an accidental lab leak is the most likely explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, which has killed more than 1.1 million Americans.
Many current and former federal officials as well as virologists have also pointed to more than $1.4 million in government grants doled out for gain-of-function experiments starting in 2014 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab located in the Chinese city where the pandemic began.
The since-debarred nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance distributed the grants to the now-infamous institute, which conducted experiments that made SARS-like viruses 10,000 times more infectious in lungs, 1 million times more infectious in brains and three times more lethal in humanized lab mice — in violation of its grant terms, NIH officials later admitted.
While those viral experiments yielded sequences genetically distinct from SARS-CoV-2, another EcoHealth proposal, which was not funded, was flagged for having the same features — while Redfield and others have suggested that even unfunded projects can be tested under other research grants.
“History has proven that viruses can escape even the most secure labs, and gain-of-function research can kill more people than a nuclear weapon,” Marshall said.
“The Dangerous Viral Gain-of-Function Research Moratorium Act is critical to ensure the federal government immediately ceases funding for this irresponsibly high-risk work. The era of unaccountable taxpayer-funded science done in the name of ‘global health’ needs to end.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) had submitted an amendment to national defense legislation last year that found the Pentagon, which has also funded EcoHealth grants in the past, has also not been able to track how much taxpayer money is going toward gain-of-function research abroad — including in China.
The Wuhan experimentation also occurred despite an earlier mandate under former President Barack Obama pausing all gain-of-function research by the US government due to biosafety and biosecurity concerns.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former White House COVID czar and director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), testified to Congress many times that the US-funded research did not strictly constitute gain-of-function experimentation, thus not violating the government-wide pause.
While claiming he had an “open mind” about the origins of the coronavirus, Fauci also told lawmakers that he believed the most likely explanation for the pandemic was the natural spread of the virus from animals to humans.
Other scientists, like Dr. Steven Quay and Dr. Richard Ebright, testified to the opposite in separate congressional hearings.
The “smoking gun” evidence for a lab origin of COVID-19, according to Ebright, came from another EcoHealth proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was never funded, that proposed the “exact feature” of a furin cleavage site in the virus.
The feature was included in a spike protein not present in any of the more than 800 known SARS viruses and the primary reason for its virulence, according to Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University.
“It’s important to emphasize that the research in question has no — zero — civilian practical applications,” Ebright also said of the gain-of-function experiments.
“Gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens is not used and does not contribute to the development of vaccines, and is not used and does not contribute to the development of drugs,” he added.
Quay, the CEO of biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics, told The Post that Marshall’s bill “to stop federal funding of dangerous gain-of-function research is a common sense solution to preventing the next laboratory-acquired infection from becoming another pandemic.”
The bill would also prevent any further experimentation of its kind with pathogens such as the Ebola, Marburg or Nipah viruses.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is also co-sponsoring the legislation.
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