As President Trump signed an executive order to ban gain-of-function research, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top officials slammed the practice.
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00:00Thank you, sir.
00:03Next, this is another proclamation declaring this week to be National Small Business Week.
00:10As you've said many times before, small business is actually big business.
00:13Small businesses are key drivers of the American economy.
00:17Your administration has taken quite dramatic steps to improve small business, to help small businesses.
00:23This is just a proclamation that recognizes those efforts and announces the National Small Business Week.
00:30Good, and before I go any further, I'd like to just, as you see behind me, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing a fantastic job.
00:38Director J. Bhattacharya, National Institute of Health, and a very special person.
00:45I interviewed him personally.
00:47I liked him immediately.
00:49I interviewed a lot of people, but I liked him.
00:53Dr. Martin McCary, likewise, the FDA commissioner who's really in there plugging hard, right?
00:59But we have some big things coming up, and, Will, everybody knows.
01:03So I just wanted to thank all of you.
01:04Vince Haley is around here someplace.
01:06Where's Vince?
01:07Vince is great.
01:08Come on up here, Vince.
01:09He should be up here.
01:11He's been with me for a long time.
01:12He's an expert on policy and speech writing, too, along with Ross, right?
01:18Yes, sir.
01:19So great.
01:19It's great to have you all.
01:20Bobby, do you have anything to say?
01:23We signed some very important documents having to do with health.
01:27I understand.
01:28Mr. President, a gain-of-function, this is an historic day, the end of gain-of-function,
01:34research funding by the federal government, and also controls by private corporations on
01:40gain-of-function studies.
01:41This was the kind of study that was engaged in by the United States military and intelligence agencies beginning in 1947.
01:51By 1969, the CIA said that they had reached nuclear equivalency, that they could kill the entire U.S. population for 29 cents a person.
02:03That year, President Nixon went to Fort Detrick and announced a unilateral end to this kind of research, what they called dual-use research, research that was for vaccination and also for military purposes.
02:18He then persuaded over 180 countries to sign the bioweapons charter in 1973.
02:24That basically ended gain-of-function research around the globe until 2002, or 2001, after the anthrax attacks, we passed the Patriot Act, and the Patriot Act had a provision, a little-known provision in it that said that although the bioweapons charter is still in effect,
02:48and the Geneva Convention is still in effect, U.S. federal officials who violate it cannot be prosecuted, and that relaunched bioweapons arms race, and that was driven by gain-of-function research.
03:04In 2014, three of those bugs escaped from U.S. labs, and President Obama declared a moratorium on future use, and instead a lot of that research was moved offshore to the Wuhan.
03:18We have launched bioweapons arms race all around the country, all around the world, so that China is engaged in it, developing all kinds of weapons using AI and CRISPR technologies that are really devastating.
03:35Russia is deeply engaged in it, Iran and many other countries.
03:39It's a kind of weapon that always has blown back.
03:43There's always bad news, and the justification for this kind of weaponry was, and this kind of research, was always that we have to do this, develop vaccines to counter a future pandemic.
03:58In all of the history of gain-of-function research, we can't point to a single good thing that's come from it, and today I commend President Trump for his courage and his vision in ending U.S. bioweapons research, and Jay, I'd love you to talk a little bit about it.
04:19Yeah, Jay, please.
04:20Sure.
04:21This is a historic day.
04:23The conduct of this dangerous gain-of-function research, which aims at taking pathogens and making them more virulent, more transmissible in humans, many scientists believe is responsible for the COVID pandemic.
04:37The conduct of this research does not protect us against pandemics, as some people might say.
04:44It doesn't protect us against other nations.
04:47What it does is there's always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out just by accident even and cause a pandemic.
04:56Any nation that engages in this research endangers their own population as well as the world, as we saw during the COVID pandemic.
05:04This proclamation makes it so that most science actually poses no threat to human populations.
05:12The vast majority of science will go on under this as normal.
05:15But the fraction of this research that has the risk of causing a pandemic, harming every single person on the face of the earth, we're going to put it, this proclamation, this executive order puts in place a framework to make sure that the public has a say,
05:30that if such a risk is being taken, that only scientists alone won't be able to decide that.
05:36That, in fact, the public can say, no, don't take this risk.
05:39And I'm really, really proud to be here with President Trump, who's signed this order, ending this research, for the first time putting in place a real regulatory framework to make it go away forever.
05:48So it can leak out, like from Wuhan, and a lot of people think that.
05:54I think I said that right from day one.
05:55It leaked out whether it was to the girlfriend or somebody else.
05:58But scientists walked outside to have lunch with the girlfriend or was together with a lot of people.
06:06But that's how it leaked out, in my opinion.
06:08And I've never changed that opinion.
06:09So it can leak out innocently, stupidly, incompetently, but innocently, and half destroy the world, right?
06:18That's right.
06:18That's right, Mr. President.
06:19Mr. President, there are, I think, three leaks, BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs.
06:26Our highest-rated laboratory is almost every week.
06:30There's no laboratory that does this right.
06:32There's no laboratory that's immune from leaks.
06:35And this is going to prevent those kind of inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity.
06:43The COVID outbreak cost 20 million lives and cost the world at least $25 trillion.
06:51And this executive order is precaution against us being involved in that kind of research in the future.
07:00That's great.
07:01I'm very honored to do this.
07:03Marty, what do you have to say?
07:05It's unbelievable to think the entire nightmare of COVID was likely preventable.
07:11And you had good instincts early on, Mr. President, in suggesting it came from the Wuhan lab.
07:16That is now the leading theory among scientists.
07:18It was five miles from the hospital where it first broke out.
07:21So it's crazy to think that this entire nightmare was probably the result of some scientists messing with Mother Nature in a laboratory with technology exported from the United States.
07:34That is, inserting a furin cleavage site.
07:36So I hope this does some good in the world, Mr. President.
07:39Thank you for doing it.
07:40Anybody have any questions on that?
07:42Yes.