US help China fund the experiment that caused the pandemic?

It is generally accepted that the Wuhan Lab generated, through an experiment gone rogue, the COVID strain that caused the pandemic. That research (referred to as gain of function) was partially funded with NIH grant money, which Fauci intended to keep secret, even under oath...until the facts were eventually exposed.

I'm no fan of Robert Kennedy but am quite familiar with Bhattacharya's work and am impressed. He's a street-smart scientist who's a good choice for the NIH. His ideas about gain-of-function research is spot on.

Jay Bhattacharya: How NIH Will End Dangerous Gain-of-Function Research

The U.S. acts to foster life-sciences experiments while minimizing the risk of a pandemic or other catastrophe.

By Jay Bhattacharya, WSJ

July 28, 2026 3:08 pm ET

In May 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. government to end dangerous gain-of-function research. In response, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies paused research projects with any possibility of falling under that description or any possibility of causing harm to human populations.

The pause was the first part of a broader strategy. A governmentwide approach was needed to guarantee that no such risky research is ever again encouraged or supported by U.S. agencies. As part of this goal, a new accountable and transparent process was necessary to oversee researchers, institutions and funding agencies.

After planning and coordinating across every relevant government agency, the Trump administration is issuing a comprehensive oversight framework that will eliminate the risk that federally funded scientific experiments will cause a pandemic or other catastrophic harm. The new policy preserves the benefits of life-sciences research while defining the areas of greatest risk, including prevention of accidental or intentional lab leaks, and penalties for irresponsible practices.

What is dangerous gain of function, and why would anyone want to conduct such experiments? Shockingly, for many years, scientific leaders across the world—including in the U.S.—touted these experiments as a way to reduce the risk of pandemics caused by novel pathogens. These leaders argued that, with appropriate oversight, viruses could be manipulated, making them more transmissible or deadly, to evaluate how likely they were to make the leap to humans from animals.

But because a lab accident could cause a pandemic, many scientists argued that no mitigation could outweigh the risks, and such gain-of-function experiments were too dangerous to permit. In response, in 2011 NIH leaders argued that the knowledge to be gained from such experiments was worth the risk.

In 2014 the Obama administration paused dangerous gain-of-function experiments to assess the potential benefits and risks. This pause was lifted in 2017 for agencies that implemented oversight of the research, which resulted in the Department of Health and Human Services releasing the HHS Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens. In practice, though, this framework allowed research to proceed after review until President Trump’s executive order to stop it last year. While these policies reflected an important step forward in overseeing high-risk research, they still fostered a culture of belief that some risks were worth taking.

The new policy makes clear that Americans won’t fund research that risks our health or security, either here or abroad. This policy is based on three principles: that there are categories of research too risky to pursue, such as dangerous gain-of-function research and international research lacking appropriate oversight; that the entirety of the biomedical research enterprise must assess and monitor risks; and that researchers, institutions and funders will be held accountable for evaluating and reporting on high-risk research.

First, funding agencies will require researchers to make clear they won’t be proposing any life-sciences experiments that the policy deems too risky to conduct. If the research could be high-risk, the researchers must conduct a risk-benefit assessment, including the potential to cause catastrophic harm to human populations in case of an accident or inadvertent laboratory leak, for further institution and funding agency review. Since such experiments often require arcane technical knowledge, researchers themselves have the most accurate information about such risks.

Second, the institutions and universities that house the laboratories and employ the researchers will be responsible for the accuracy of the researchers’ risk assessment to ensure no risky work is proposed. Institutions will be required to have specialized infrastructure to conduct these reviews. If institutions or researchers fail to report the risk of catastrophic harm from an experiment, the government can impose financial penalties or prevent future federal funding.

Third, federal funding agencies like NIH will be required to review funding proposals for potential risky research and flag any proposal with the potential to significantly endanger Americans’ health or security. Proposals in the gray zone must be reviewed by an independent expert board that will make recommendations on eligibility for funding or required steps for risk mitigation. Under the new policy, the funding agencies will no longer be grading their own homework, providing checks and balances across all levels of research.

Similarly, agencies will be prevented from funding projects conducted by or alongside America’s adversaries—a determination that will be made by the State Department, intelligence agencies and other departments. Proposals for research to be conducted overseas will undergo an additional level of review. No research will be funded if the oversight doesn’t align with American values and interests.

There is still work to be done over the next few months—for example, identifying the independent body that will conduct reviews and issue the final word on review. Coordination with universities and independent laboratories will be required as these organizations provide support for implementing the new policy. But in the meantime, federal funding agencies will continue their ban on dangerous gain-of-function research.

In December 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi set off humanity’s first nuclear chain reaction, in a squash court at the University of Chicago. Before the experiment, Fermi—a brilliant mathematician—calculated the chance that the reaction would blow up Chicago. Only after calculating the probability to be zero did he conduct his experiment. Under President Trump’s new high-risk life-science research policy, federally funded researchers will take the same care that Fermi did to avoid causing pandemics or other catastrophic harm.

Dr. Bhattacharya is director of the National Institutes of Health.