United States – The staff of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce accused federal health officials of three instances of providing false and misleading information in the investigation of potentially risky research on the mpox virus.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) “consistently stonewalled and misled the Committee” over a period of 18 months regarding work conducted by an agency scientist manipulating a strain of the mpox virus, the report reveals, as reported by The Hills.
NIH and HHS were contacted by the committee to try to gain more insight into the possible risks and benefits of the experiment described in an interview given in Science magazine; the report said that the Agency failed to provide most of the information that was requested.
Lack of Transparency and Trust Issues
“The Committee has lost trust in the NIH and NIAID’s ability to oversee its own research on potential pandemic pathogens or enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and to fairly determine whether an experiment poses an unacceptable biosafety or public health risk,” committee staff wrote.
In this case, the committee had to issue a subpoena before HHS officials agreed to state the Agency had approved the research.
HHS insists that, while they approved the riskier research, the Agency never conducted it.
“The experiment referenced by the committee was never conducted, which the committee knows. HHS remains committed to ensuring the safety of biomedical research,” an HHS spokesperson said.
“The committee is looking for an issue where there isn’t one. HHS and its divisions, including NIH, follow strict biosafety measures as our scientists work to better understand and protect the public from infectious diseases — like mpox,” the spokesperson added.
However, the report indicated, “No such documentation or any other evidence has been provided to support this assertion. ”
Continued Investigation Required
For his part, the committee claims that the NIH approved the study in 2015 but only did not grant clearance until the committee started inquiring.
“This deliberate, prolonged effort to deceive the Committee is unacceptable and potentially criminal,” the staff report said. “The Committee needs additional evidence from HHS, the NIH, or NIAID to have confidence that the experiment did not occur.”
Ongoing Probes and Future Hearings
In a 2022 Science article, NIH scientist Bernard Moss noted that he was preparing for the experiment to study how severe mpox is, using genes from a more virulent strain of the virus and putting them into a less virulent strain.
Specifically, the committee claims that the experiments were conducted under gain of function research, which has turned into a sensitive issue given the research on the origins of coronavirus and the possibility of the virus having originated from a lab in China.
Another Republican source claimed that back in the Energy and Commerce Committee, a hearing on COVID-19 and lab safety is expected to be held in the coming weeks.
The NIH probe is a continuation of an investigation the committee started back in 2022 of NIH’s research protocols with special emphasis on mpox and Moss’s tests, as reported by The Hills.
“The plan is to continue the investigation because there’s so much in the way of information and documents that we’re still waiting on … to get an accounting of what actually happened here,” a GOP committee staff member said.
“We’re just pushing as hard as we can, and they’re hardly giving us anything,” the staffer said. “And that is a shattering of norms in which the Congress and NIH have previously engaged.”