In multiple letters and other communications, HHS and the NIH repeatedly told the Committee the most dangerous MPXV experiments[1] had not been “formally proposed” or “planned,” had never been approved or conducted, and were not currently under consideration. The NIH also issued public statements making the same assertion and even forced Science magazine to issue a Clarification for one article on the experiment.[2]
Figure 1: Outline of mpvx clades. Note that a 2017 mpox outbreak in Nigeria had a fatality rate of 9 percent, according to CDC experts who briefed Majority Committee staff. Years later, this mpox was Classified as a clade IIb strain. However, other clade II outbreaks had low lethality rates.
HHS’s repeated assertions that the risky transfer of clade I material into clade II virus experiment was never proposed or approved were false. Internal NIH documents show this experiment was formally proposed and received approval before the NIH’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) on June 30, 2015—seven years before the Committee first asked about the MPXV experiment. With the IBC’s approval, researchers could have conducted the proposed bidirectional experiment at any time after June 2015, until May 2023, when the approval was effectively revoked by the NIH (approximately seven months after the Committee’s initial letter that raised concerns about conducting the experiment described by Dr. Moss). The only requirement imposed on the 2015 approved experiment was put in place after a 2018 IBC review, which required the scientists to notify—but not seek new
- ↑ The GOFROC experiment that would have inserted genes from the low transmissibility but highly pathogenic clade I version of the virus into a more transmissible but low pathogenic clade II version of the virus.
- ↑ Jocelyn Kaiser, Making Trouble, Science (Oct. 19, 2022, updated with clarification on Oct. 28, 2022, 4:25 p.m.), https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-weighs-crackdown-experiments-could-make-viruses-more-dangerous.
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