Already on the hot seat with the House Oversight Committee for allegedly misleading the public about funding gain-of-function research and colluding to suppress the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 origins, federal regulators and science journals now face scrutiny from another set of lawmakers over their claims about research alleged to be even more dangerous.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans released an interim staff report this week alleging multiple agencies "misrepresented and deceived" lawmakers over 17 months by denying that staff proposed research to swap genes between "more lethal" and "more transmissible" lineages of monkeypox, much less that higher-ups approved the experiments.
The Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases slowly relented their obstructions, "almost always to avoid either a transcribed interview or a subpoena," the report says.
An HHS letter March 19 and private documents review by "bipartisan Committee staff" the next day "confirmed what the agencies had been denying for over a year," that NIH's Institutional Biosafety Committee approved a proposal by NIAID "distinguished" pox virologist Bernard Moss and his team for a "bidirectional MPXV approach" between monkeypox clades 1 and 2 in 2015.