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.
This means genes from the more deadly clade - a term meaning a group of viruses that "Usually have similar genetic changes" and "a single common ancestor" - would be inserted into the more infectious clade.
Moss told Science in September 2022 his team already swapped genes from clade 2 into clade 1 to see whether they could make the latter less dangerous and was "Planning to try the opposite," which the committee said prompted its interest.
Contrary to the relatively mild illnesses, if any, caused by SARS-CoV-2 from the beginning of the COVID pandemic for people not already at high risk from infection, Moss's research determined monkeypox clade 1 "Can kill a mouse at levels 1,000 times lower than those needed with clade 2," Science reported then.
Under P3CO, "There are legitimate concerns that this experiment could enhance a pathogen with pandemic potential by making the more transmissible mpox clade I more transmissible," the committee report says.
She called his proposal "Catnip" to committee Republicans who see it as gain-of-function research - "a gong that, once sounded, reverberates with echoes of an unproven yet oft-repeated allegation" that COVID escaped from the Wuhan lab - while reporting NIAID denied Moss had made a "Formal proposal" for the research.
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