In an ambitious effort aimed at curtailing potentially hazardous scientific practices, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is scrutinizing over 120 foreign biological laboratories that have long been financed by US taxpayer money. This investigation aligns with President Trump’s executive order to halt “gain-of-function” research, which involves manipulating viruses to study their potential effects.
Gabbard issued a statement to The Post on Monday, asserting her commitment to mapping out the locations of these labs, along with identifying the pathogens they house and the nature of the research being conducted. Her goal is to terminate risky gain-of-function experiments that could pose threats to both American and global health.
“The COVID-19 pandemic starkly illustrated the devastating global consequences that research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can unleash,” Gabbard emphasized. She criticized political leaders, health experts like Dr. Fauci, and certain members of the Biden administration’s national security team for allegedly misleading the public about the existence of these US-backed biolabs and intimidating those who sought to bring the truth to light.
As part of Gabbard’s initiative, the US Intelligence Community will undertake a comprehensive review of the research conducted at all US-funded biolabs. This includes facilities involved in gain-of-function experiments that could heighten virus transmissibility, as well as those conducting defensive research against perilous pathogens.
Officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence highlighted that these international labs span more than 30 countries. Many of these facilities had previously received funding through a Department of Defense program designed to dismantle weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of the Cold War.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence officials noted that the foreign labs extend into more than 30 countries, and several had received funding in the past through a Department of Defense program that sought to dispose of weapons of mass destruction after the end of the Cold War.
More than 40 of the biolabs under review are located in Ukraine — and could “be at risk of compromise” due to Russia’s war, ODNI officials noted.
The research, which is part of the Defense Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, is aimed at studying pathogens to prevent future outbreaks and enhancing biosecurity for the US.
Critics have argued that lax oversight of the research funding, which often flows through US agencies to grantees and subawardees, prevents Americans from knowing whether potentially dangerous experiments are being conducted.
Clinical trials currently being conducted at the biolabs are now “raising significant, ethical, financial and security concerns,” ODNI officials said.
The Biden administration denied the existence of US-owned or US-operated “chemical or biological laboratories in Ukraine,” dismissing the claims as Chinese and Russian propaganda in a March 9, 2022, statement, the month after Kremlin forces invaded.
The clarification came in response to congressional testimony from Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland the day before, when she said: “Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of.”
Under Trump, ODNI officials said the hasty denials were part of an “Information Resilience” strategy that sought to “shape the public narrative” to “mitigate and counter foreign malign influence,” while downplaying US ties to the research.
Last May, Trump signed an executive action to ban all federal funding for the gain-of-function research in China, Iran or other nations that don’t exercise proper oversight, claiming that SARS-CoV-2 had proved dangerous pathogens “can leak out innocently, stupidly and incompetently, but innocently and half destroy the world.”
The Defense Department’s watchdog had previously been unable to determine how many possible enhanced potential pandemic pathogens were being researched in China or other nations — despite more than $1.4 billion being spent on such experiments outside the US between 2014 and 2023.
Between 2014 and 2021, US-funded experiments on bat coronaviruses at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology were also found by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to have violated grant terms by making the viruses 10,000 times more infectious, though officials have denied that the research caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the past, both ex-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health officials supported gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens — so long as the benefits outweighed the risks.
“Putting aside the specter of bioterrorism for the moment, consider this hypothetical scenario: an important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations,” Fauci wrote in a 2012 scientific paper titled “Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward.”
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” Fauci asked. “Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario—however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?”
“Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks,” he wrote.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration is righting the wrongs of the Biden administration.
“The prior administration bankrolled dangerous Gain-of-Function research and foreign biolabs with American tax dollars, then deliberately hid it from the American people,” Hegseth said in a statement.
“The declassification of this discovery shows how little oversight this work had. Under President Trump’s leadership, DNI Tulsi Gabbard and the entire Cabinet are righting these historic wrongs and delivering justice for our warfighters and the ones they protect. The era of lies and betrayal is over.”
