US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci of resuming biological weapons research under the guise of vaccine production – an activity he believes most likely caused the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019.

Gain-of-function research aims to alter viruses to make them more contagious and deadly. Such research is used both in the development of biological weapons and in the development of vaccines and treatments.

Kennedy stated in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Dr. Fauci effectively restarted the US biological weapons program, despite President Richard Nixon’s attempts to shut down all such laboratories as early as 1969.

– Anthony Fauci began essentially restarting the arms race, and the bioweapons arms race, and did it under the pretension of developing vaccines, because of the same science that you develop bioweapons and vaccines, Kennedy said.

RFK Jr: “Anthony Fauci restarted the bio-weapons arms race under the pretense of developing vaccines… eventually moving his experiments offshore, mainly to the Wuhan Lab.”@SecKennedy ARREST FAUCI!
pic.twitter.com/SmgDp5bGXf

— NanLee Marie Carissimi (@NanLee1124) May 6, 2025

On the same day that the interview was broadcast, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning gain-of-function research and all federal funding for such activities.

Experiments moved abroad

Kennedy further claimed that “three of his bugs escaped” from Fauci’s laboratories in the US in 2014, which, according to him, prompted 300 scientists to sign a letter urging then-President Barack Obama to stop the experiments.

– President Obama declared a moratorium, but instead of shutting down his experiments, he moved them offshore, mainly to the Wuhan lab, Kennedy said, referring to what he described as indirect federal funding from Fauci to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Wuhan laboratory has been identified in several investigations as a possible source of the coronavirus pandemic.

– The CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Energy – all say that it is most likely that those experiments resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2019, the US health secretary continued.

“A kind of weapon that always has blowback”

During the signing of the executive order at the White House, Kennedy expressed his support for the decision and described gain-of-function research as a form of biological arms race that now involves countries such as Russia, China, and Iran.

– It’s a kind of weapon that always has blowback. There’s always bad news and the justification for this kind of weaponry and this kind of research was always that we have to do this to develop vaccines to counter a future pandemic, he said.

– In all of the history of gain-of-function research we cannot point to a single good thing that’s come from it, Kennedy added.

Believes Fauci appealed for pardon

President Trump emphasized at the signing that the measure could have made a difference if it had been implemented earlier.

– It’s a big deal, could have been that we wouldn’t have had the problem we had if we had this done earlier, he said.

Kennedy also commented on President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon Anthony Fauci just hours before leaving office:

– I don’t know what was going on in Joe Biden’s head, but I think that Anthony Fauci probably asked for that pardon, knowing that he had some liabilities here that were more than reputational, Kennedy said.