Is Donald Trump To Blame for a COVID Lab Leak?
If COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab as a result of U.S.-funded gain-of-function research, is Donald Trump to blame?
The New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells seems to imply the answer is yes in his latest column.
Wallace writes:
It was under the Trump administration in 2017 when the National Institutes of Health lifted an Obama-era pause on gain-of-function funding in what may have looked at the time like an inside-baseball argument among scientists but now looks more like a strike against liberal safetyism, which reopened the door to the kinds of research the American right now reflexively blames for the pandemic.
Writer Richard Hanania made a similar point in a recent essay on the right’s stolen valor on gain-of-function skepticism, saying that, “In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk [gain-of-function] studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017.”
Both writers are trivially correct that the Obama administration implemented a pause on gain-of-function research and the first Trump administration lifted it.
Yet both writers’ implied point—that Trump’s newfound hawkishness on gain-of-function research is belated and hypocritical—misses a few key facts.
Firstly, the Trump administration’s lifting of the Obama administration’s pause was a continuation, not a break, of its predecessor’s policies. Secondly, and more importantly, federally funded gain-of-function research continued unhampered under both the Obama and Trump administrations’ policies.
Understanding both points is important for grasping why past efforts to more closely vet gain-of-function research failed in a possibly catastrophic way.
To start, the Obama administration’s pause on gain-of-function r
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