'Supercharged Monkeypox': House Republicans Charge NIH With Dangerous Gain-of-Function Research

I previously speculated whether the government was tinkering with avian flu with gain-of-function research. It turns out, I may have been right in principle but wrong about the actual virus.

Via Fox News:

House Republicans are pressing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for answers after the agency funded research experiments they say could result in a “supercharged” monkeypox virus.

In a letter to acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and two subcommittee chairmen are demanding that the agency turn over documents and information regarding a government-funded experiment that reportedly involves swapping monkepox genes with a deadlier version of the virus. The lawmakers want to know whether this project was approved by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) review board tasked with oversight of research involving enhanced pathogens that could potentially cause a pandemic.

How profoundly ironic is it that the Public Health™ authorities may ultimately sicken the entire planet and even potentially exterminate the human race?

That the NIH is even in a position to possibly conduct existentially threatening gain-of-function research — with taxpayer money, no less — in complete secrecy is a testament to how far we have fallen into techno-tyranny.

Continuing:

This letter is a follow-up to an October 31, 2022, letter to which Republicans say the NIH never responded. GOP lawmakers accused NIH of “stonewalling” in a press release.

“Based on the available information, it appears the project is reasonably anticipated to yield a lab-generated monkeypox virus that is 1,000 times more lethal in mice than the monkeypox virus currently circulating in humans and that transmits as efficiently as the monkeypox virus currently circulating in humans. The risk-benefit ratio indicates potentially serious risks without clear civilian practical applications,” the Republicans wrote. [emphasis added]

In any kind of decent, non-suicidal society, all gain-of-function research would, at the very least have been paused if not entirely banned after we’ve learned, despite the Public Health™ authorities’ best censorship efforts, that it very likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gain-of-function research should rightly be regarded as the threat that it is, on par with nuclear weaponry and terrorism (actual terrorism, not the DHS’ “domestic terrorism” contrivance). Why shouldn’t it? As we’ve seen, it can be used to achieve political objectives otherwise impossible, and it’s just as potentially destructive — even more so — than any other form of weapon.

The practitioners of gain-of-function research, once it’s outlawed, should be diligently prosecuted and their punishments swiftly executed once found guilty in due legal proceedings.