, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases officials on several occasions misrepresented to the Congress information about experiments that would have enhanced the deadliness of mpox viruses.
The committee began looking into the experimentation 17 months ago following an article written about NIAID scientist Bernard Moss inin September 2022. The article described an experiment that would have taken lethal components from the more-deadly mpox clade I and combined them with the more easily transmissible strain, mpox clade II.
When committee staff began asking HHS and NIH about the experimentation in October 2022, public health agency officials and Moss himself insisted that the experiments never occurred and were purely hypothetical.