Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during interviews on CNN and FOX News this morning that the U.S. has a plan to end viral gain-of-function research around the world, in addition to a complete ban inside the U.S.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Gain-of-function research is a kind of research where you take a pathogenic organism, like a coronavirus, and you try to make it more virulent. You try to get it so it can spread faster and so that it’s more deadly. Why would you do such a thing? Either because you want to weaponize it, or you say, “We want to develop a vaccine against future mutations” — which is nonsense. No good thing has ever come from gain-of-function research. … People have been trying to put guardrails around it for generations, and it hasn’t worked. Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic and many other global pandemics that we have had have come from gain-of-function research. The RSV epidemic that we have, which is the biggest killer of kids in this country today, came from these kinds of experiments. Lyme disease almost certainly came from this kind of research. The scientists who you say are experts are making the argument that this is necessary for pandemic response. Can they point to one instance in history where research that came out of this kind of experimentation has actually provided us something beneficial? … We have adopted a system that will end it in our country and, we believe, will end it around the world, because we will no longer support science in other countries that supports it. Any scientist who does these experiments will be punished, and they can be permanently banned from any kind of grants. The universities that support this research will also suffer liability. We’ve had too many bad things happen: Lyme disease, which almost certainly came from these experiments and is devastating our country; RSV, which came from a laboratory and is now the biggest killer of children in our country; and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a trauma for the whole globe. All of those have been credibly linked to gain-of-function research. It is something with enormous costs and no proven benefits. … The most disturbing thing about that hearing-and about the release of his diaries-was the huge delta between what he was saying privately and what he was telling us publicly. One of the clear examples of that is that, in January 2020, he says in his diaries that he had just met with 16 scientists and that they all agreed this could not have come from the wet market. The very next day, he was telling Americans that it came from the wet market. That’s the story he continued to spin for the next two years. There are so many examples of that in his diary, and we need to restore trust. The way you do that is by being trustworthy.

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