House Republicans accused the National Institutes of Health Tuesday of substantially misleading Congress and the public about research on potentially lethal mpox, or mokeypox, viruses.
An interim staff report from the GOP-run House Energy and Commerce Committee concludes that NIH, Department of Health and Human Services, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases officials on several occasions misrepresented to the Congress information about experiments that would have enhanced the deadliness of mpox viruses.
“In order to start rebuilding trust in our government health agency guidance, agencies like the NIH must be honest and transparent with Congress and the American people,” said committee leadership in a press statement. “This report demonstrates a disturbing lack of judgment and accountability from HHS, the NIH, and particularly, NIAID. It is unacceptable and demonstrates the clear need for reform.”
The committee began looking into the experimentation 17 months ago following an article written about NIAID scientist Bernard Moss in Science in September 2022. The article described an experiment that would have taken lethal components from the more-deadly mpox clade I and combined them with the more easily transmissible strain, mpox clade II.
According to the committee report, the experiment could have resulted in a virus with a case fatality rate of 10% to 15%. The research would not have technically fallen under the regulatory definition of gain-of-function research because mpox does not fall under the category of “pathogens with pandemic potential.”
When committee staff began asking HHS and NIH about the experimentation in October 2022, public health agency officials and Moss himself insisted that the experiments never occurred and were purely hypothetical.
Public records, however, show that the potentially dangerous experiment was approved by NIAID’s Institutional Biosafety Committee via a formal process in June 2015.
To date, NIAID has produced no evidence that the experiments were not completed, such as lab notebooks or other contemporaneous evidence to suggest that the project had been terminated after it was approved by the biosafety body.
The Republican report calls the behavior of HHS “unacceptable and potentially criminal.”
“This deception appears to be part of a systematic effort by HHS and the NIH to delay and obstruct the Committee’s lawful investigation into NIAID’s risky research,” reads the report.
Republican committee aides told reporters on Tuesday that the public health agencies have failed in their traditional role of working with lawmakers to ensure that sensitive research is being overseen properly, eroding the norm of cooperation between Congress and the bureaucracy.
Committee aides also said that these findings, along with congressional work on the COVID origins investigation related to NIAID funded research in Wuhan, China, has generated bipartisan concern about improving biosafety.
Such recommendations would include restraining the power of NIAID to approve experiments, potentially giving the power directly to the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Committee aides told reporters that the investigation is ongoing to determine whether the experiments were conducted and to inquire about other risky research that could pose a danger to the public despite not fitting the regulatory definition of gain-of-function.