President Trump officially outlaws gain-of-function research



In a massive win for the Make America Healthy Again movement, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning all federal funding — present and future — for gain-of-function research abroad.

The order will also deputize the National Institutes of Health and other agencies to identify biological research harmful to public health or threatening to national security.

As Trump signed the executive order, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a few comments of his own.


“This is a historic day. The end of gain-of-function research funding by the federal government, and also controls by private corporations on gain-of-function studies,” Kennedy said while standing next to the president. “This was the kind of study that was engaged in by the United States military and intelligence agencies, beginning in 1947.”

“By 1969, the CIA said that they had reached nuclear equivalency — that they could kill the entire U.S. population for 29 cents a person,” he continued. “That year, President Nixon went to Fort Detrick and announced a unilateral end to this kind of research — what they call dual-use research.”

Dual-use research, Kennedy explained, was “for vaccination and also for military purposes.”

Nixon then persuaded over 180 countries to sign the bioweapons charter in 1973, which essentially put an end to gain-of-function research across the globe — until the 9/11 and anthrax attacks — which led to the Patriot Act.

“The Patriot Act had a provision, a little known provision in it, that said that although the bioweapons charter is still in effect, and the Geneva Convention is still in effect, U.S. federal officials who violated it cannot be prosecuted,” Kennedy added.

“Now, you hear this and you’re like, ‘Well, they already told us that they were not supposed to be engaging in gain-of-function research, but they were,’” Sara Gonzales of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered” comments.

“And they weren’t doing it with someone who you would call maybe our ally. They were doing it with, of course, China, which I just feel like it takes a basic level of intelligence to be like, ‘That’s a bad idea. That’s not a good idea,’” she continues.

And a bad idea it was.

“You’ve got America's health institutions implicated in the development of that man-made virus,” Gonzales says. “It makes you wonder how many more have happened or are on the way that we just don’t know about yet.”

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Despite Biden’s pardon, Anthony Fauci still faces legal perils. Here they are.



Joe Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci may protect the former National Institutes of Health official from immediate criminal prosecution, but some critics say he is not completely out of legal jeopardy and that public sentiment might still condemn the man who became known during the COVID-19 pandemic as “Mr. Science.”

In the days before Biden offered the pardon to Fauci, along with other critics of Donald Trump, some experts who have followed Fauci’s career and handling of the pandemic, as well as members of the Trump transition team, reiterated their assertion that Fauci perjured himself on several occasions during the pandemic — especially regarding his agency’s links to the lab in Wuhan, China, that may have created the virus that causes COVID-19.

Biden’s pardon negates the two Senate referrals for criminal activity. But future hearings could still require Fauci to respond to evidence that he may have perjured himself.

The pardon addresses any COVID-related offenses and is backdated to 2014 — the year a U.S. ban on so-called "gain of function" virus research took effect. Fauci has been accused of outsourcing that research to China.

Despite reporting that Trump is bent on revenge, the appetite among MAGA appointees for holding Fauci accountable hasn’t been particularly vocal. But former Senate investigator Jason Foster, who now runs the whistleblower nonprofit Empower Oversight, says that Biden’s pardon creates new legal jeopardy for Fauci.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has vowed to continue investigating COVID’s origins, and sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and House Republican investigators plan to do so as well. When testifying in those inquiries or answering written depositions, Fauci will be unable to dodge questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

“They can ask him if he lied before, replow old ground,” Foster said. “And if he lies about any prior lie, he can be prosecuted for that or held in contempt.”

Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, said such hearings are necessary for scientific and historical reasons. “I’m hopeful that he will now come clean about everything he knows about the origins of the virus,” Noymer said. “For the sake of public trust in science — explaining what killed 20 million people — that a complete account is much more important than speculation about what criminal penalties he may have avoided.”

“These pardons will not stop Department of Justice investigations,” said one adviser to the Trump transition team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We expected this and look at it as a predicate to get truth from people who can no longer use the Fifth Amendment. Now we can bring every one of them in front of a grand jury.”

A legacy of deception

There is no consensus on Fauci’s handling of the pandemic. Legacy media outlets promoted Fauci throughout the pandemic as “America’s doctor” who “sticks to the facts” and applauded him as “the nation’s top infectious disease expert.” When he retired from the NIH after five decades in 2022, the New York Times granted him space on its opinion page to advise the next generation of scientists, citing his own accomplishments.

Numerous social media outlets have provided a polar opposite perspective. Several X accounts have uploaded videos that show Fauci’s inconsistencies. For example, Fauci claimed in early 2022 interviews that he never recommended lockdowns, but later said he recommended shutting the country down. Independent journalist Matt Orfalea circulated another set of clips that show Fauci claiming he kept an “open mind” about how the pandemic started while alleging in others that the evidence pointed against a lab accident and “strongly” in favor of a natural spillover.

As Fauci’s flip-flops generated attention in Republican circles and on social media, he charged that such criticism was “totally preposterous,” adding, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

Fauci’s many contradictory statements even caught the attention of a New York Times contributing opinion writer, Megan K. Stack, who chastised Fauci for “the largely one-sided nature of his public remarks” about the possibility that the pandemic started from an accident at a lab his agency had helped fund — the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Initially, Fauci dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident on a Feb. 9, 2020, podcast hosted by Newt Gingrich. Afterward, Fauci reversed himself, stating in several interviews that he had always kept an open mind.

Later reports zeroed in on Fauci’s secret involvement in prominent March 2020 research, called the “proximal origin” paper, that turned public and scientific sentiment against the possibility of a lab accident. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper concluded, adding, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Published in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal, the “proximal origin” paper is the most-cited scientific paper of 2020.

Subsequent emails showed that Fauci helped guide the “proximal origin” paper to publication, as congressional probers found, “without revealing that he had been involved with its creation and had even, according to the emails, given it his approval.”

Distancing himself from his own emails, Fauci later told the Times that he wasn’t sure he even got around to reading the paper. But the House later released a multiday deposition of Fauci in which he was asked about his involvement in the “proximal origin” paper. Under oath, Fauci admitted to having received and read several drafts of the paper.

But while dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal. And the Department of Justice has two referrals from Congress already requesting that Fauci be prosecuted for lying under oath.

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Lies as legal jeopardy

Fauci’s habit of bending the truth, as some see it, was notably on display at a July 2021 Senate hearing when Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, bored into the funding Fauci approved for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While Fauci attempted to downplay his financial involvement with the Chinese government lab, reports were already percolating.

In April 2020, Newsweek reported that Fauci had approved a grant for risky gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan lab. The Washington Post editorial board in March 2021 then called for an independent investigation into EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit funded by the Fauci-run National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. With this grant, EcoHealth subcontracted research to the Chinese, the Post noted, to do experiments involving “modifying viral genomes to give them new properties, including the ability to infect lung cells of laboratory mice that had been genetically modified to respond as human respiratory cells would.”

Fox News reported Sunday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has barred EcoHealth Alliance Inc. and its former president, Dr. Peter Daszak, from receiving federal funds for five years. EcoHealth allegedly failed to report dangerous gain-of-function experiments to the government, which eventually led to the five-year ban.

A month before Fauci’s hearing with Paul, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs confirmed that U.S.-funded research at the WIV consisted of gain-of-function virus research that could have started the pandemic. “[I]t is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus.” At that time, Sachs led a commission formed by a British medical journal, the Lancet, to investigate how the pandemic began.

But when Paul began grilling Fauci about these details and called him out for what he characterized as evasive answers, Fauci pointed the finger back at Paul. “If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you,” Fauci said. Paul then sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice requesting that it investigate whether Fauci had committed perjury.

“He definitely misled the senator,” said former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield. When Redfield looked at all the evidence, including still-classified information, he said the weight falls in the direction of a lab accident. “Fauci manipulated the public to believe there was only one possible cause for the pandemic, a natural spillover.”

Months after Paul’s referral to the Justice Department, liberal news nonprofit ProPublica released new documents confirming the Wuhan lab had conducted such studies. “Grant money for the controversial experiment came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci,” ProPublica reported on September 9, 2021.

“NIH admits funding risky virus research in Wuhan,” Vanity Fair reported a week after ProPublica, referring to a letter the NIH sent to Congress.

Paul sent a second referral to the Department of Justice in July 2023, reiterating his demand that Fauci be investigated. At that time, House investigators released emails showing that in early 2020, Fauci admitted that scientists were concerned the COVID virus had been engineered and researchers in Wuhan were engaged in gain-of-function research.

“Everything he has been telling us from the very beginning has been a lie,” Paul told Fox News. “We have documented it’s a lie, and it’s a felony to lie to Congress.”

Biden’s pardon negates the two Senate referrals for criminal activity. But future hearings could still require Fauci to respond to evidence that he may have perjured himself and open him up to future prosecution if he stands by statements that can be proven to be false.

Hiding the use of private email

Another area of potential inquiry is Fauci’s congressional testimony last summer denying his use of private email to conduct official business. “Let me state for the record that to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business via my personal email,” Fauci wrote in his sworn statement to Congress.

This testimony seemed to contradict evidence in a 35-page memo compiled by Republican investigative staff. One email showed Fauci’s second in command, Dr. David Morens, suggesting that someone speak with Fauci through an unofficial, private channel. In another email, Morens wrote that he would contact Fauci on Gmail.

After Fauci’s testimony, the writer of this article reported in the DisInformation Chronicle that Morens had connected KFF Health News reporter Arthur Allen with Fauci on Fauci’s private email back in May 2021. The NIH did not respond to comment about Fauci’s use of private email to conduct government business with reporters.

In a second example, the New York Post reported that the watchdog group the White Coat Waste Project accused Fauci of lying to Congress about his private email use after the group released documents showing Fauci was back-channeling with a Washington Post reporter on his private email.

“I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account,” Fauci wrote in an email dated Oct. 29, 2021, to Washington Post reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb.

Fauci’s lawyer told the Post that Fauci was discussing a personal matter with the Washington Post reporter, although he did not explain what this personal matter was.

Justin Goodman, senior vice president at the White Coat Waste Project, said the evidence is clear that Fauci contacted the Washington Post about issues regarding his NIH work and then denied it to Congress. “He should be prosecuted, not pardoned.”

Follow the money

Congressional hearings might also delve into Fauci’s involvement in research misconduct with the “proximal origin” paper and a grant he approved for the paper’s lead author, Scripps Research Institute’s Kristian Andersen.

“There needs to be a criminal investigation of this grant and paper,” said a former law enforcement official who has worked with congressional staff investigating Fauci and his grants. “Nobody inside the executive branch has taken ownership of this.”

'It’s been a huge paradigm shift to see a hero actually turn into a villain.'

Shortly after the COVID virus outbreak, Fauci began discussing with several virologists, including Andersen, how the pandemic started. In a Feb. 1, 2020, email, Andersen wrote to Fauci that he had analyzed the COVID virus genetic sequence and “some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Andersen added that while opinions could change, he and other virologists felt the virus was not natural or consistent with “expectations with evolutionary theory.”

Later that same day, Fauci held a phone call with Andersen and other virologists and then emailed that the scientists were suspicious that a “mutation was intentionally inserted” into the virus. Other emails show that Fauci was concerned that his funding for research in China may have led to the COVID virus.

Despite their initial suspicions, Andersen and other virologists reversed course six weeks later and published the “proximal origin” paper on March 16, 2020, that absolved Fauci of funding research that led to the pandemic. Fauci then promoted the Andersen “proximal origin” paper to reporters at a White House briefing on April 17 without disclosing that he had helped marshal the study into publication.

A month later, Fauci signed off on an $8.9 million grant to Kristian Andersen. Both Andersen and Fauci have denied that the grant was quid pro quo for Andersen publishing the “proximal origin” paper that absolved Fauci, but the group Biosafety Now has called twice for the paper to be retracted.

“It is imperative that this clearly fraudulent and clearly damaging paper be removed from the scientific literature,” reads an online petition signed by over 5,000 scientists.

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and co-founder of Biosafety Now, said that Fauci should have been prosecuted for “criminal conspiracy” for his secret involvement in the “proximal origin” paper. Ebright added that the grant Fauci gave to Andersen after he published the paper likely also involved criminal behavior.

With Republicans running both the Senate and House, investigations of Fauci will likely continue as members resume digging into any NIH culpability in funding research that started the pandemic. Trump’s CIA nominee, John Ratcliffe, told House members during a 2023 hearing that classified intelligence points toward a lab accident. Ratcliffe is likely to be confirmed, and a Trump transition team source said he would likely then declassify that information, further undermining Fauci’s claims that the pandemic started from a natural spillover.

Ongoing investigations of Fauci, RCI has been told, will only further erode his credibility, even if criminal charges can no longer be filed. “This pardon means he can no longer be brought to justice,” said an adviser to the Trump transition team. “But it guarantees he will be further exposed.”

“I trusted everything Fauci said during the pandemic, and I did everything he told me,” said Bri Dressen, a former preschool teacher in Saratoga Springs, Utah. “I masked, wiped down my groceries with alcohol, kept my kids away from other kids so they wouldn’t catch the virus, and then I got vaccinated.” Dressen ended up injured by AstraZeneca’s vaccine as a volunteer in the company’s clinical trial and founded React19.org, whose 36,000 members advocate on behalf of victims of COVID vaccine harm.

“It was the steepest learning curve in my entire life. The people in authority like Fauci are the ones I shouldn’t have trusted,” Dressen said. “It’s been a huge paradigm shift to see a hero actually turn into a villain.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

SCOTUS sides with BIDEN in censorship case to prevent ‘grave harm’



The Supreme Court has ruled that the Biden administration may coordinate with social media companies to censor viewpoints it deems dangerous.

“We all know the Biden regime is not going to censor leftists,” Sara Gonzales says, frustrated by the ruling.

This decision from Murthy v. Missouri saw state attorneys general who accused government officials of working with social media companies under the guise of combating misinformation and disinformation. The AGs argued that officials suppressed discussions on Hunter Biden’s laptop, COVID-19 origins, and vaccine efficacy.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had sided with the plaintiffs on the grounds of the First Amendment.

The Justice Department then argued that the temporary ban of this “public private partnership” would cause irreparable harm because it may prevent the federal government from working with social media companies to prevent “grave harm” to the American people and the democratic process.

SCOTUS indirectly agreed with the Justice Department by reversing the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision. Only Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented.

They claimed that a “review of extensive government social media communications is outside of the Court’s scope,” that “allegations of past censorship are not enough to prove future censorship,” and that “injuries claimed by plaintiffs are indirect and anticipatory.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for conservatives.

“This is not really the decision that you want, walking into an election as a conservative, where like all but one of the social media platforms very much want to censor your opinion,” Gonzales says.

“The reasons that they argue that these plaintiffs lack standing just seem to be the most convoluted bogus reasons in my opinion. How can you say that past actions are not proof of future actions? Like the Biden regime has a very clear record of pressuring social media companies, Big Tech platforms to censor conservatives,” she adds.


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Flashback: Why did Moderna sign a government contract for its vaccines before COVID-19?



When Dr. Fauci testified before a House subcommittee on the origins of COVID-19, many thought the time had finally come for tough questions.

While the questions asked made it clear that he lied about six-foot distancing and masking — Glenn Beck knows it could, and should, have been a lot worse.

“I find this incredible that we’ve missed this,” Glenn says, noting that the government signed a contract with Moderna on December 12, 2019, that ensured the pharmaceutical company would not be held liable for its vaccines.

The contract was originally proposed in 2015.

“I’ve been through many, many high level negotiations, but I’ve never seen anything that started four years before. Coincidentally, once they find the Frankenstein virus and then they negotiate for four years, and what a coincidence, they sign it just before the breakout of COVID,” Glenn says.

Not only was the pharmaceutical company ready far before the outbreak, but Dr. Fauci had been funding gain-of-function research — which he has continuously lied about.

“There’s lie number one. Then this strange, ‘Hey let’s partner with Moderna.’ I don’t think this is normal,” Glenn continues, noting that the gain-of-function research was paid for by American taxpayers.

“Where’s the money, where’s it going? My feeling is it’s going to fund more of this,” he predicts, adding, “We already know Fauci was funding the Wuhan lab. We also recently found out that he was funding experiments that killed puppies in a gruesome way. So, what else was getting funded through government and private funds?”

After following the money trail as well as endless incriminating emails, Glenn has come to a conclusion.

“Is there any other way to describe it other than Fauci and the president’s science advisor colluding behind the president’s back, withholding information from him?” he asks.

“Fauci has already been brought in front of Congress and Rand Paul caught him in a bold-faced lie. Fauci will testify again, but it’s probably time to bring in the former president’s science advisor as well."


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Leaked Pentagon paper indicates the US government suspected all along that Fauci's COVID-19 natural-origins theory was rubbish



A leaked Pentagon paper penned early in the pandemic indicates the U.S. government suspected all along that Fauci's COVID-19 natural-origins theory may have been rubbish.
The paper, obtained and released this week by a COVID-19 origins research outfit, concluded that the arguments for a zoonotic origin advanced in the March 2020 paper commissioned and given final approval by retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci were "based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions."

What's the background?

Despite privately expressing uncertainty about the origin of the virus, there was a well-documented effort by Fauci and several of his peers — some with connections to the Wuhan lab and the dangerous research on coronaviruses undertaken there — to downplay the possibility that COVID-19 originated in a lab and to instead bolster then-unsubstantiated claims that the virus had naturally made the trans-species jump to humans.
TheBlaze previously reported that many of the top scientists who were attempting to account for the origin of the furin cleavage site on the virus' spike protein — responsible for its relatively high infectivity — were confronted with the strong possibility of human intervention.
Scripps Research Institute immunology professor Kristian G. Andersen, whose later claims are referenced in the newly leaked Pentagon paper, directed British evolutionary biologist and virologist Edward Holmes' attention to the "furin cleavage site between the S1 and S2 junctions," which had features characteristic of genetic engineering.

Some of Andersen's colleagues were "bothered by the furin site" and had "a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab."

Michael Farzan, professor and chair at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute, reportedly suggested prior to the publication of the narrative-curing March paper, "A likely explanation could be something as simple as passaging SARS-like CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adaptation to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage."

Andersen raised the matter of a gain-of-function study that "looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory."
Notwithstanding these concerns and others that human meddling and/or a lab leak might be to blame for the pandemic that ultimately claimed more than 15 million lives worldwide, the scientists rushed out "The Proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," which was ultimately published March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine — just one month after Andersen admitted, "We are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn't conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered."

An undisclosed counterpoint

Commander Jean-Paul Chretien, a Navy epidemiologist working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Dr. Robert Greg Cutlip, a senior scientist at the Institute for Defense Analysis who previously worked as a senior research scientist with the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote a critique of the Fauci-endorsed natural-origins paper.
The paper was leaked to the public Monday by a research group that calls itself the "Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19."
Chretien and Cutlip's working paper, dated May 26, 2020, cast significant doubt on Andersen's suggestion that the notable features of COVID-19 — namely the presence of key amino acids in the receptor binding domain not found in SARS-related coronaviruses and the furin cleavage site — arose naturally and not as the result of laboratory manipulation.
Rather, the authors noted that the features of the virus discussed by Andersen were "consistent with another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory, by methods that leading coronavirus researchers commonly use to investigate how the viruses infect cells and cause disease, assess the potential for animal coronaviruses to jump to humans, and develop drugs and vaccines.”
Chretien and Cutlip referenced a number of experiments that evidenced ways by which a similar virus could have been created, including a 2015 study examining "the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV," which at the time had been circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations."
This particular study, involving a virologist at the Wuhan lab believed to be the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, claimed to have reverse-engineered SARS-CoV to create a "chimeric virus" expressing the spike of a bat coronavirus in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
TheBlaze previously noted that the 2015 study also resulted in the production of a strain that was able to "replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells."

Chretien and Cutlip concluded their paper thusly: "The evidence Andersen et al. present does not lessen the plausibility of laboratory origin."

Undesirable facts get sidelined

Prior to this working paper's completion, Fauci had already successfully pitched his version of events to the American people.

Fauci told CBS' "Face the Nation" in March 2020 that COVID-19 was an animal virus that jumped to a human.

When asked during a White House press briefing on April 17, 2020, whether it was possible that the virus "came out of a laboratory in China," Fauci answered in the negative, citing the paper without bothering to note he had commissioned, edited, and approved it.

In May 2020, around the time the Pentagon paper was timestamped, Fauci told National Geographic that there was "no scientific evidence" to suggest the virus had come from the Wuhan lab.
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