Marjorie Taylor Greene Wants to Make Certain Vaccines Illegal to Fund

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to make it illegal to fund some vaccine labs.

Greene, a member of the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, laid out her goals for the panel on Wednesday, urging lawmakers in a post on X, formerly Twitter, to outlaw scientific labs that "create vaccines as the cure for the man made lethal viruses."

The House committee has been investigating the origins of COVID-19, including the lab leak theory, as well as the U.S. response to the pandemic, including vaccine mandates and programs overseen by the government. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as the nation's leading infectious disease expert before retiring last year, sat for 14 hours of closed-door interview sessions with the committee earlier this month.

"Every committee has a legislative purpose. Our @COVIDSelect committee should pass legislation to ban funding to labs that create viruses to kill people and create vaccines as the cure for the man made lethal viruses," Greene wrote. "That's not science. Those are bio-weapons. This should be illegal."

It is unclear which labs would be included under the ban proposed by Greene, but there were hundreds of labs involved in the development of the COVID vaccines.

"The notion that there was a lab that made this vaccine, or even a couple labs that made this vaccine, it's not right," Paul Offit an internationally-recognized immunology expert and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Newsweek. "It's built on a mountain of work."

Funding for the COVID vaccines was first granted by the Trump administration as part of Operation Warp Speed, a federal effort that was initially funded with roughly $10 billion from the CARES Act that former President Donald Trump signed into law on March 27, 2020.

There were several labs that contributed to the development of the vaccine, including a lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and labs at Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis, infectious disease expert and professor of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center William Schaffner told Newsweek. He added there were also labs in Europe that helped provide "the basic science backbone that led to the vaccines."

Schaffner said he believes Greene's proposal, however, is more focused on "gain of function" research, which involves labs where researchers can create a potential pandemic virus to study how to prevent and treat future pandemics. Newsweek reached out to Greene via email for comment.

Nonetheless, Offit warned that restrictions on what labs are allowed to research could have larger, detrimental impacts on the scientific community, whose discoveries and technological innovations are dependent on science's ability to "roam free."

"I was fortunate to be part of a team that created the rotavirus vaccine and that was a 25-year effort that involved probably 200 labs across the world," Offit said. "We would have international meetings, as what's happened here with mRNA technology, where you would have people from all these different countries sending their data and trying to make sense of this until finally a vaccine emerged.

"There's no shutting that down unless you just want to shut down the entire scientific process," he said.

Greene's proposal comes months after the U.S. suspended federal funding to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in July following a months-long review from the Department of Health and Human Services, which found that WIV was "not compliant with federal regulations."

Although the details of Fauci's testimony have not yet been publicized, Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup released a statement after the interviews, claiming that Fauci "signed off on all domestic and foreign research grants without reviewing the proposals and admitted that he was unaware if NIAID conducted oversight of the laboratories they fund.

"It is also concerning that the face of our nation's response to the world's worst public health crisis 'does not recall' key details about COVID-19 origins and pandemic-era policies," Wenstrup said.

Greene also accused Fauci of "enhancing viruses" to create vaccines to treat them and called for the doctor to be jailed following his testimony before the panel.