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 released an interim staff report on its lengthy investigation into the NIAID-approved gain-of-function research into the MPXV, a virus that causes the deadly disease commonly known as 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 monkeypox virus.

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 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 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........

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