Page:Interim Staff Report on Investigation into Risky MPXV Experiment at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.pdf/12

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Figure 5: Map of countries where mpox clades are endemic.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/mpox/about/index.html

MPXV, along with smallpox and other orthopoxviruses, also poses a significant threat to the United States and the world due to its potential for weaponization, accidental release, and the vulnerability of populations which stopped routinely vaccinating against smallpox in the 1970s.[1] The former Soviet Union extensively researched MPXV and used it as a model to weaponize smallpox, demonstrating the plausibility of bad actors using MPXV as a biological weapon.[2] The biological weapons potential of MPXV and other orthopoxviruses has only increased since the end of the Cold War.[3] On March 26, 2024, the National

  1. ↑ Bipartisan Comm’n on Biodefense, Box the Pox: Reducing the Risk of Smallpox and Other Orthopoxviruses 2 (Feb. 2024), https://biodefensecommission.org/reports/box-the-pox-reducing-the-risk-of-smallpox-and-other-orthopoxviruses/.
  2. ↑ Id. citing Steve Mitchell, Monkeypox Could Be Used as a Bioweapon, United Press Int’l (June 9, 2002), https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2002/06/09/Monkeypox-could-be-used-as-bioweapon/19421023612300/.
  3. ↑ See Ryan S. Noyce & David H. Evans, Synthetic Horsepox Viruses and the Continuing Debate about Dual Use Research, PLOS Pathogens (Oct. 14, 2018): “At the heart of the discussion lies the fact that this is dual use research of concern (DURC) because any method that can be used to assemble horsepox virus could be used to construct variola, the virus that causes smallpox.” The same argument could be made about similar research involving monkeypox. See Nicholas G. Evans, Dual-use Decision Making: Relational and Positional Issues, Monash Bioeth. Rev. 268 (2014): “Though the work [mousepox study] had potential application in controlling rodent plagues in Australia [ ] and better understanding poxviruses – of which cowpox, monkeypox, and smallpox are all transmissible in humans – the research also had a dark side. The genetic similarity of poxviruses left open the potential for using the research to modify a human-transmissible poxvirus; a recipe for a deadly pandemic [ ].” There is no evidence that the NIH IBC or any other NIH committee in 2015 reviewed the mpox gene transfer experiment for dual-use concerns. Since a different

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