Monkey Pox
Last updated
Last updated
For nearly nine years Anthony Fauci’s institute concealed plans to engineer a pandemic capable mpox virus with a case fatality rate of up to 15 percent, congressional investigators revealed.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee today released a report titled “Interim Staff Report into Risky MPXV Experiment at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.” The report details the Committee’s investigation, which was launched following a 2022 Science magazine interview in which Dr. Bernard Moss of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) revealed that he was planning to insert segments of a lethal strain of MPXV (formerly known as “monkeypox”) into a more a transmissible strain of the virus. This proposed experiment alarmed some scientists concerned about the risks of creating an enhanced version of the MPXV virus.
NIAID — the institute Fauci oversaw for nearly four decades and which underwrites most federally funded gain-of-function research — concealed the project’s approval from investigators with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce over the course of a 17 month-long investigation.
The committee, in conjunction with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, is also investigating coronavirus gain-of-function research underwritten by NIAID at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and faces similar stonewalling in that investigation, a committee aide said.
NIAID’s lack of transparency surrounding the proposed mpox experiment for nearly a decade undermines Fauci’s assurances at a congressional hearing last week that any biosecurity breach at the Wuhan lab could not have any connection to his former institute. Investigators continue to pursue documentation from EcoHealth Alliance, an NIAID contractor whose funding was recently suspended for failing to properly oversee coronavirus experiments exported to Wuhan.
The Maryland study involved extracting dozens genes from the more severe clade 1 (pictured left) monkeypox virus and putting them into the less virulent clade 2 virus. They will then infect mice with the hybrid virus and monitor how the disease progresses.
“NIAID cannot be trusted to oversee its own research of pathogens responsibly,” the report concludes. It also suggests that new federal rules for “gain-of-function” (GOF) studies that make risky viruses more potent or better able to spread in people don’t go far enough.
GOF research funded by the United States in Wuhan, China, helped spur President Joe Biden’s administration to revamp federal rules for regulating risky GOF research in May.
But the report suggests the new policy doesn’t go far enough because it allows researchers, their institutes, and NIAID, which funds this work, to decide which projects fit the GOF definition and therefore require a high-level federal review. “This is an inescapable conflict of interest,” the report concludes. It says instead this screening should be done by a review panel housed at HHS or a new “wholly independent” entity. Only about 100 proposed experiments a year would need to be reviewed, “not a huge workload,” another committee staffer said.
