Government Health Officials Misled About Risky Mpox Research, House Panel Finds

Government officials, while acknowledging they previously offered false information, maintain the experiment was never conducted.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in Washington in a file image. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Government officials falsely said an experiment that would place genes from one mpox (monkeypox) strain into another strain was never proposed or approved, according to an investigation from a U.S. House of Representatives panel.

Dr. Bernard Moss, a longtime scientist with the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told a magazine in 2022 that he planned to take genes from the highly virulent clade 1 mpox and place them into a less virulent but more transmissible strain as part of ongoing testing in mice and other small animals.