NIH officials flouting Trump, protecting viral research that may have unleashed COVID: report

With a Sept. 2 deadline for an interagency group to finalize the policy required by President Trump's executive order against gain-of-function research, which may have unleashed SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic, a National Institutes of Health "policy shop [that has] remained unchanged since the Biden administration" is undermining the president's agenda, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation report.

Citing "three government sources involved with the process," the report said President Biden's NIH old guard doomed a consultant hired by Director Jay Bhattacharya who was a critic of the GOF research shepherded and shielded by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.

"I was fired at the request of the White House," Edward Hammond wrote on X, but he only knows it was "not performance related." He had planned to resign at the end of the month anyway mainly due to "concerns over the federal GOF policy."

Another critic of the Fauci policy who was leading the new policy development, former White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy Director Gerry Parker, had already left six months into the job for personal rather than professional reasons, he told DCNF.

Though Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. portrayed Trump's executive order as a GOF ban, the 120-day policy revision process replaced a literal GOF ban in the draft that Parker reportedly had tried to keep NIH from influencing due to its historic support for GOF.

Bhattacharya promoted his deputy Matthew Memoli's longtime collaborator Jeffrey Taubenberger, who also worked with Fauci on GOF policy and "revived and published the genome" of the 1918 Spanish flu, to lead NIAID and its GOF reforms, DCNF said. 

The director has "full confidence" in Taubenberger, NIH told the publication, and Bhattacharya himself responded to criticism of the appointment on X, citing "interactions" with Taubenberger that convinced him the new NIAID director "is committed to biosafety, strict prohibition of dangerous gain of function work, and a new direction for NIAID" despite his "past associations."

Government sources separately told DCNF the policy due Sept. 2 "has prompted confusion" because it will be determined by agency heads "rather than standardized across agencies" and that the approach "could also invite loopholes from subversive bureaucrats."

Bhattacharya tasked the same Biden NIH official responsible for the original policy, Associate Director for Science Policy Lyric Jorgenson, with writing Trump's policy, two government sources told DCNF.