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MONKEYPOX OUTBREAK DUE TO LAB LEAK

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Topic: MONKEYPOX OUTBREAK DUE TO LAB LEAK
Posted By: Albert
Subject: MONKEYPOX OUTBREAK DUE TO LAB LEAK
Date Posted: 02 Jul 2024 at 7:41am

Monkeypox: House Investigators Find NIH Hiding Risky Viral Gain-of-Function Research https://www.dailysignal.com/author/bmoffit/ - Robert Moffit  |  https://www.dailysignal.com/author/mark-howell/ - Mark Howell  | 

Dr. David Morens, seen here at a House subcommittee hearing on May 22, sought to sidestep FOIA requests for his emails relating to the origins of COVID-19. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Can there any longer be any doubt?

The behavior of senior officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the powerful federal agency formerly run by Dr. Anthony Fauci, is intolerable.

And the performance of the Department of Health and Human Services in response to legitimate congressional inquiries has been abysmal.

The latest evidence comes to us courtesy of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee recently  https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/MPVX_Interim_Staff_Report_and_Appendices_final_844c87e06f.pdf - released an interim staff report  on its lengthy investigation into the NIAID-approved gain-of-function research into the  https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/23/is-monkeypox-next-covid-19-what-this-physician-thinks/ - MPXV,  a virus that causes the deadly disease commonly known as  https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/07/28/monkeypox-primarily-affects-gay-men-why-are-we-scared-to-say-it/ - monkeypox .

Gain-of-function research is laboratory research deliberately designed to enhance the virulence and the transmissibility of a pathogen. According to the House committee’s report, the National Institutes of Health and NIAID misled lawmakers for more than 17 months before handing over proof that they approved gain-of-function experiments to be performed on the  https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/08/08/its-not-moral-to-request-abstinence-to-stop-monkeypox-lgbt-activists/ - monkeypox  virus.

Dangerous Pathogen

America experienced a brief monkeypox scare in 2022 and 2023. While the infection had limited transmissibility and was thus contained, the virus is nonetheless a dangerous pathogen. The West African-based variant of the virus, which circulated in the U.S., was less lethal, however, than the Congo-based variant, which was both more transmissible and deadly.  

In September 2022, Science  https://www.science.org/content/article/will-monkeypox-virus-become-more-dangerous - published an article  in which a Dr. Bernard Moss was interviewed about his research on MPXV. In the October 2022 edition of Science, some scientists  https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-weighs-crackdown-experiments-could-make-viruses-more-dangerous - expressed  concern that Moss’ research, if completed, could have created “a more potent version of the mpox outbreak strain,” which “could spark an epidemic that would be substantially more lethal.”

House members acted quickly.

In October 2022, the committee began investigating potential gain-of-function research into monkeypox that may have been conducted by Moss.

According to the September 2022 issue of Science, Moss had been swapping genes between two groups of organisms—“clades”—thought to have a common ancestor: clade 1 MPXV (the Congo variant), which is “lethal to more than 10 percent of the unvaccinated humans,” and the more transmissible but less deadly clade 2 MPXV (the West African variant).

Though Moss swapped genes from clade 2 into clade 1 in hopes of making it less deadly, Moss—according to the Science article—was also “planning to try the opposite, endowing clade 2 virus with genes from its deadlier relative.”

That type of experiment would  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/ - qualify as gain-of-function  research, thus making a deadly pathogen even more deadly to humans.

Hiding Information

It was not until March of this year that congressional investigators confirmed that Moss had, in fact, submitted a proposal to the NIH Institutional Biosafety Committee to conduct a “bidirectional transfer of genes between clades I and II of the MPXV.”

The biosafety committee had, in fact, approved that proposal on June 30, 2015, nearly nine years before investigators started their inquiry. According to the interim  https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/MPVX_Interim_Staff_Report_and_Appendices_final_844c87e06f.pdf - report , “HHS and the NIH misled the Committee in official written correspondence about the MPXV gene-transfer experiment on no fewer than five occasions over the course of 17 months.”

This deception, in the language of the report, was not only “unacceptable,” but also “potentially criminal.”

The bureaucrats’ behavior was positively weird.

It’s still not clear whether the NIAID-approved gain-of-function monkeypox experiments were, in fact, ever conducted—and NIAID officials repeatedly denied that they were carried out. Congressional investigators note, however, the NIH repeatedly refused to provide any documentary evidence that would back up their claims.

If there was nothing to hide, why the stubborn noncooperation?

So, it appears that NIH/NIAID officials simply refused lawmakers’ repeated requests for information over a 17-month period for no other reason than to evade legitimate congressional oversight. 

Concerning controversial viral gain-of-function experiments, the congressional staff investigators thus  https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/MPVX_Interim_Staff_Report_and_Appendices_final_844c87e06f.pdf - concluded : “NIAID cannot be trusted to oversee its own research of pathogens responsibly … or “be trusted to honestly communicate with Congress and the public … .”  

Chalk up another self-inflicted black eye for public health.  

Cover-Up Specialists

This latest NIH and NIAID scandal comes on the heels of reports of NIH’s poor oversight of controversial  https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/23/in-covid-19-oversight-house-republicans-deliver-a-win-for-accountability/ - grant funding  in China and in the wake of damaging  https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/31/what-are-nih-officials-hiding-fauci-to-testify-on-americas-response-to-covid-19/ - revelations  that Dr. David Morens, then a senior adviser to Fauci, went to great lengths to evade Freedom of Information Act inquiries relating to the origins of COVID-19, using personal emails to evade the disclosure of communications related to the origins of the pandemic and taxpayer funding for EcoHealth Alliance, the controversial firm that engaged China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology as a subcontractor.

The Wuhan Institute, which had been working closely with the Chinese military, was the epicenter of Communist China’s notorious and risky coronavirus research. Finally, HHS  https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/23/in-covid-19-oversight-house-republicans-deliver-a-win-for-accountability/ - disbarred  both EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute from securing federal grant funding for at least three years.

Worse, according to Morens’ own February 2021 email, he  https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/31/what-are-nih-officials-hiding-fauci-to-testify-on-americas-response-to-covid-19/ - was assisted  in evading FOIA requests by the very person responsible for enforcing the law, Marg Moore, who heads up the NIH FOIA office: “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe. Plus, I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail,” he wrote.

After The Nation, a leftist journal,  https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nih-foia-covid-origins-morens-hearing/ - inquired  into the status of Morens and Moore, the HHS resorted to standard bureaucratese about its commitment to the rule of law, responding: “HHS doesn’t comment on personnel matters.”    

Next Steps

In its report on the monkeypox experiment, congressional investigators  https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/MPVX_Interim_Staff_Report_and_Appendices_final_844c87e06f.pdf - concluded :

NIAID has a culture of secrecy and obfuscation regarding experiments involving pandemic and potential pandemic pathogens. HHS and the NIH are complicit in enabling NIAID’s culture of secrecy and obfuscation.

This is incompatible with accountable, democratic governance and further erodes the public’s trust in government health agencies. 

Congress needs to get tough with NIH and should consider key interim staff  https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/MPVX_Interim_Staff_Report_and_Appendices_final_844c87e06f.pdf - recommendations:  remove final approval of sensitive viral gain-of-function research from NIH and NIAID and consider vesting final review and perhaps veto authority over any such project in an independent body, and require any taxpayer-funded institutions that conducts research into “potentially dangerous” pathogens also to be subject to  independent oversight boards and to operate at the highest levels of lab biosafety.

Beyond that, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., has  https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/chair-rodgers-unveils-framework-for-nih-reform-requests-stakeholder-input - launched  a broad “framework” for discussion on comprehensive NIH reform. The goal would be to streamline an overly complex organization, improve the research approval process, and facilitate better congressional oversight.

As analysts at The Heritage Foundation have detailed, the federal government’s  https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/SR265.pdf - performance  during COVID-19 has damaged its standing with millions of Americans. Federal officials’ continued lack of transparency concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, mixed messaging on masks and counterproductive vaccine mandates, unscientific edicts and pronouncements, along with the repeated and scandalous  https://www.heritage.org/public-health/commentary/enough-enough-covid-oversight-requires-tougher-congressional-action - refusals  to respond to legitimate congressional inquiries, have all contributed to a serious loss of public trust.

In an age when global viral contagions can kill millions of people at home and abroad, America cannot afford such a loss of faith in the public health agencies whose job it is to protect them. Popular cynicism could prove deadly.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/01/house-investigators-find-nih-hiding-risky-viral-gain-function-research/




Replies:
Posted By: Dutch Josh
Date Posted: 02 Jul 2024 at 11:58am
There are strict rules for "gain-of-function" studies. Also lots of debate/discussion on it...

Both on the use and the risks...However both the claim "CoViD" was a result of a lab-leak, or M-pox was a lab-leak-gain-of-function study going wrong and are highly speculative...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak ;
The initial cluster of cases was found in the  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom - United Kingdom , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#cite_note-:13-8 - [8]  where the first case was detected in  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London - London  on 6 May 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#cite_note-gov.uk-9 - [9]  in a patient with a recent travel history from  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria - Nigeria  where the disease has been  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_%28epidemiology%29 - endemic . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#cite_note-WHO12-10 - [10]  On 16 May, the  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Health_Security_Agency - UK Health Security Agency  (UKHSA) confirmed four new cases with no link to travel to a country where mpox is endemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#cite_note-gov.uk-9 - [9]

 Subsequently, cases have been reported from many countries and regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#cite_note-11 - [11]  The outbreak marked the first time mpox had spread widely outside  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Africa - Central  and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa - West Africa . The disease had been circulating and evolving in human hosts over several years before the outbreak and was caused by the clade IIb variant of the virus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#cite_note-12 - [12]

DJ see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#Cases_per_country_and_territory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#Cases_per_country_and_territory or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_mpox_outbreak#Cases_per_country_and_territory 

There is a clear link with West Africa...so why even claim a US Lab Leak ? 

Bad reporting, sensational anti-science !



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