initially relayed that information. In either case, it is clear that there is a need for transparency and additional, external oversight of potentially risky GOFROC experiments.
History of the Investigation
Clarification to the Science article on the Dr. Moss MPXV Experiments
On October 28, 2022, Science magazine made a clarification to its October 19, 2022, article based on information provided by the NIH. The clarification stated explicitly that the clade II virus in Dr. Moss’ research discussion in the September 2022 Science magazine was clade IIa, not clade IIb, which had spread in the U.S.[1] The clarification did not refute that Dr. Moss had proposed or planned gene transfers from clade I to clade IIa. Further, Dr. Moss’ team wrote in an early November 2022 preprint of an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) that later appeared in February 2023 that they intended to extend their research to include clade IIb: “We have started to investigate the genetic determinants responsible for virulence differences of clade I and IIa viruses and plan to extend this to clade IIb pending institutional approval.”[2]
No distinction was made about the directions of gene transfers in either of these statements, nor was the NIH explicit about the directions of the transfer either. There is no contemporaneous evidence in the fall of 2022 supporting the NIH contention that the gene transfer from clade I to clade II was not proposed or acted on in any way. It was not until
- ↑ However, in 2015, when the Moss team proposed the gene transfer study the sub-clades of clade II were not yet known. The sub-clades were not identified until 2022. The documents indicate that the Moss team was using the Clade II strain of monkeypox known as USA 2003. The monkeypox spread from a prairie dog to a human, but there was no documented human-to-human transmission. In 2017, monkeypox reemerged in Nigeria as an outbreak and was classified as Clade II. It was later determined that it was Clade IIb Between 2017 and 2021, 226 laboratory-confirmed cases and eight deaths (3.5 percent fatality rate) due to monkeypox were reported in Nigeria. Dimie Ogoina, Science Speaks: A Brief History of Monkeypox in Nigeria, Infectious Disease Soc’y of Am. (Sept. 20, 2022), https://www.idsociety.org/science-speaks-blog/2022/a-brief-history-of-monkeypox-in-nigeria/#/+/0/publishedDate_na_dt/desc/. It is unclear whether the IBC approval included permission for the Moss team to change Clade II viruses if it wanted to. Majority Committee staff has a pending informational request with NIH on this point. The Nigerian case data indicates a much higher lethality than the rates for other clade II(b) outbreaks. The Moss team’s PNAS article in 2023 showed their interest in extending gene transfer studies to include Clade IIb. It is also interesting that clade IIb is more transmissible than clade IIa but with higher lethality. This seems contrary to the general understanding that as a virus gets more transmissible it gets less lethal. Given the lack of information about the immunological competency and nutritional status of the infected patients, more study and analysis are needed to account for this data.
- ↑ Jeffrey L. Americo, Patricia L. Earl, & Bernard Moss, Virulence Differences of Mpox (Monkeypox) Virus Clades I, IIa, and IIb.1 in a Small Animal Model, PNAS (2023), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220415120.
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