‘Could Spark an Epidemic’: House Committee Report Alleges Fauci and NIAID Concealed Plans to Engineer Enhanced Monkeypox Virus

A new interim report released Tuesday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee alleges that Anthony Fauci and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) approved plans to engineer an enhanced version of the MPXV virus (formerly termed “monkeypox”) and lied to Congress about its plans.

The committee began its investigation into this process after Science published an article in September 2022 that included an interview with NIAID virologist Bernard Moss. Moss stated during the interview that he and other scientists at the agency, after successfully swapping genes from the highly transmissible but less lethal clade II MPXV with those from the far more dangerous clade I MPXV, planned to do the opposite, transferring genes from the lethal but less transmissible version into the less dangerous but more transmissible one.

The report states that the proposal “alarmed some scientists who believed a more potent version of the mpox outbreak strain could spark an epidemic that would be substantially more lethal.”

However, the committee alleged that NIAID stonewalled efforts to uncover information about the viral engineering project. NIAID representatives have consistently claimed the experiment never happened but have not provided any evidence to bolster that claim. Ultimately, the report states, individuals at the Department of Health and Human Services admitted that Moss and his team had been granted permission to insert genes from the lethal virus clade into the more transmissible version.

In fact, that experiment had been approved in 2015, years before the Energy and Commerce Committee began its investigation.

The MPXV affair is not the first time Congress has accused Fauci and his NIAID of withholding important information from investigators. A memo from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic showed that a high-level adviser to Fauci appeared to attempt to avoid transparency by using his personal email and deleting correspondence related to the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit that oversaw coronavirus research. That adviser, David Morens, also appeared to have personally advised an EcoHealth leader on keeping his position once the organization began to draw scrutiny.