Trump’s ‘Stop Virus Research’ Order Reignites ‘Ukraine Biolab’ Disinformation Campaign

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Thursday that US President Donald Trump was preparing an executive order that would stop US funding for research into how viruses are made more virulent or contagious. The moratorium is intended to assess whether the current levels of safety and oversight of scientific experiments that modify viruses in secure labs is adequate.

Olga Lautman, through her Disinformation Tracker substack, drew attention to the response of pro-Kremlin and other conspiracy theory bloggers to the news on Friday.

For some, it was an “admission” that the US was implicated in the release from a Chinese research facility of the modified SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For others, it resurrected the decades-long Russia-inspired disinformation campaign that the US had established biological weapons research and production in Ukraine.

At the forefront of these accusations was the @WarClandstine “X” channel,  which had been propagating the “Ukrainian bioweapons” story during the lead-up to Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion and since and which stirred up a hornets’ nest of anti-US, anti-Kyiv and pro-Moscow fellow travelers.

Lautman also drew attention to another disinformation story that bloggers had linked to the virus research announcement.

This concerned reports on the BBC and elsewhere on Friday that Trump had pulled the security detail allocated to Anthony Fauci, the former US Chief Medical Advisor who had led the White House Coronavirus Task Force and whose advice was frequently contradicted by Trump and his team.

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This was picked up by the notorious conspiracy theorist Cillian@CilComLFC, along with the pro-MAGA Live From America TV “X” channels and the Los Angeles based “Peoples Voice” news website considered by most as the purveyor of fake news.

They categorized Trump’s move as being in response to an extradition request from Russia for Fauci to face charges of COVID-linked “crimes against humanity” as one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s preconditions for a deal to end the war in Ukraine.

While there were several responses that pointed out that the story was fake and that the US doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Russia, many more were happy to go along with the proposition – one of the most bizarre being by “Beth McClain” on X who wrote:

“… my issue with sending Fauci [to Russia]. Russia and China are allies. Fauci and China are allies. There is a HUGE chance Fauci could end up in China doing more work against the USA and the rest of the world.”

As Lautman commented, these posts were aimed at reigniting “conspiracies around COVID-19, [fueling] anti-science sentiments, and [propagating] debunked bioweapon narratives as part of Russia’s persistent efforts to weaken US and European support for Ukraine.”