Donald Trump has signed a dramatic executive order to cut off all federal funding for dangerous virus research in hostile or unregulated countries — five years after COVID-19, which US intelligence now says likely came from a lab accident.

The former President’s sweeping order, signed on Monday, will immediately halt “any present and all future” US funding for gain-of-function research in countries like China and Iran that lack proper safety oversight. This type of research genetically alters diseases and other pathogens in order to study them, which can make them more virulent and therefore dangerous if leaked from a lab.

The order will also empower the National Institutes of Health and other agencies to root out and defund biological research deemed harmful to public health or a threat to national security, according to a post on X, formerly known as twitter, from the White House's Rapid Response 47 X account.

It said: "@POTUS just signed an executive order protecting Americans from dangerous gain-of-function research.

"The order: — Ends any present and all future Federal funding of dangerous gain-of-function research in countries of concern like China and Iran and in foreign nations deemed to have insufficient research oversight.

"Empowers American research agencies to identify and end Federal funding of other biological research that could pose a threat to American public health, public safety, or national security.

"Prohibits Federal funding from contributing to foreign research likely to cause another pandemic. These measures will drastically reduce the potential for lab-related incidents involving gain-of-function research, like that conducted on bat coronaviruses in China by the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

"Protects Americans from lab accidents and other biosecurity incidents, such as those that likely caused COVID-19 and the 1977 Russian flu."

The move follows growing belief among top US intelligence agencies that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a lab accident in Wuhan, China. The FBI, Energy Department and CIA have all pointed to a lab leak as the likeliest origin of the virus, as have former health officials including Dr. Robert Redfield, ex-CDC Director, reports the New York Post.

Others, including chief medical advisor under the Biden administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci and former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, have continued to back the theory that COVID jumped naturally from animals to humans.

Trump’s new order also halts all research involving infectious pathogens and toxins until a new, stricter policy is developed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the national security adviser. That policy will include new enforcement and reporting rules.

While President Biden signed a similar restriction into law in December 2022, it included loopholes: Health and Human Services secretaries could override the ban after notifying Congress — and federal officials have been unable to fully track where grant money ends up.

The new order intensifies the spotlight on controversial US-funded research in Wuhan. Between 2014 and 2021, more than $1.4 million in grants and subawards were funneled through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, then run by Fauci, and the US Agency for International Development.

The project, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” led to gain-of-function work, according to Dr. Lawrence Tabak, ex-NIH principal deputy director. However, Tabak and others have denied a direct link to COVID.

Another grant proposal from EcoHealth — Project DEFUSE — has drawn even more scrutiny. Though never funded, it has been labeled a “smoking gun” by critics who claim it shows COVID was engineered in a lab. Oddly, DEFUSE was excluded from a 2021 US intelligence report on COVID’s origins, despite being unclassified.

Documents and drafts obtained by US Right to Know show EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak tried to “downplay” Wuhan researchers' involvement in the proposal.

“I simply wanted to stress the US side of the proposal,” Daszak testified to Congress in 2023, before acknowledging that Chinese biosafety rules were weaker than in the US.

EcoHealth submitted the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 2018, but it was never funded. Still, Dr. Redfield has warned that unfunded proposals can still be executed under different grants.

In his hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Daszak also said he didn’t have access to all the Wuhan lab’s genomic data, admitting there may be unpublished coronavirus samples still held there.

A whistleblower at the Department of Defense revealed DEFUSE was left out of the US Intelligence Community’s 2021 COVID origins report, even though FBI and DoD scientists had found additional evidence pointing to a lab leak. That information was reportedly excluded from a briefing delivered to President Biden by then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

Both Daszak and Fauci have long dismissed the lab-leak theory. Fauci, once the Biden administration’s COVID czar, repeatedly branded lab-leak proponents as “conspiracy theorists.”

Meanwhile, a Department of Defense Inspector General report uncovered that US officials still cannot track the full extent of gain-of-function research taking place in China and other nations.