A group of Republican senators urged the federal government to halt funding to all ongoing and new gain-of-function research, which they say may have contributed to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“These experiments pose extreme threats to public health if the altered pathogens are accidentally or deliberately released,” the senators wrote in a letter (pdf) dated Nov. 22 addressed to Dr. Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
“[W]e ask for the moratorium to include studies that enhance the virulence or transmissibility of any pathogen to produce an ePPP [enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential] and studies that confer efficient human transmissibility on a pathogen of even modest virulence,” the five Republican senators wrote….