RFK Jr. to Newsmax: Ending Gain of Function Is Health Milestone

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Newsmax on Tuesday that President Donald Trump's executive order prohibiting federally funded gain-of-function research on biological agents and pathogens was a "milestone and historic development."

"Gain of function is an area of science where scientists really play God," Kennedy told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "And they're taking pathogenic viruses and they're making them more transmissible, they're making them more virulent, and they're making them more deadly.

"President Trump wants to have our federally funded scientists actually improving public health, ending chronic disease, fighting infectious diseases rather than creating new ones. And yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order to ban dangerous gain-of-function studies in this country and prevent us from funding those studies abroad. And I think it was a milestone, a historic development. I'm very grateful to President Trump for doing that."

Kennedy said gain-of-function studies resulted after the U.S. began biological weapons research in 1947, but that President Richard Nixon ended it in 1969. Nixon then ordered the U.S. to destroy its entire stockpile of biological agents and restrict its future biological research program to defensive measures, such as vaccines and field detectors, according to the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Nixon also led the charge for a United Nations-drafted Biological Weapons Convention treaty, which the Senate ratified in 1972 and to which 187 other countries agreed.

But Kennedy blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for reviving gain-of-function research in 2001, following a series of anthrax attacks in the U.S.

Although the Obama administration paused such federally funded research in October 2014, the National Institutes of Health lifted that pause in December 2017 for experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. A lab leak at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was studying gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, is believed to be what sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Gain of function studies and bioweapons development was forbidden by the bioweapons charter," Kennedy said. "Nixon did something really extraordinary. He went to Fort Detrick [in Maryland] in 1969 and said, 'We're unilaterally stopping all bioweapons development.' And then he got 180 countries to sign the bioweapons convention [treaty]. Bioweapons and gain-of-function science stopped between 1973 and 2001.

"When Anthony Fauci began launching these studies again in 2001, after the anthrax attacks, it precipitated an entire bioweapons arms race across the globe, and the Chinese are now deep into this. Russia is deep into it, Iran, and many other countries."

Kennedy said Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state in Nixon's administration, described such research in 1969 as "the poor man's atom bomb."

"Anybody can make this stuff, particularly now with AI technology and CRISPR technology," Kennedy said, referring to artificial intelligence and technology that allows scientists to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms.

"They can make it in their garage if they have the blueprint," Kennedy said. "And these scientists, the federally funded scientists, were creating the blueprint and then publishing them, and they were just how-to manuals about how to destroy humanity. It was really insane what we were doing.

"And I'm very, very grateful for President Trump for putting an end to it in this country. And we're looking forward to his leadership around the world and getting other countries also to ban it."

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