Page:Interim Staff Report on Investigation into Risky MPXV Experiment at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.pdf/7

 reasonable for the Committee to infer that assertions that the experiment was never conducted are inaccurate in light of HHS’s past misrepresentation that the risky experiment was never formally proposed or approved.

The Committee needs additional evidence from HHS, the NIH, or NIAID to have conﬁdence that the experiment did not occur. While it could have been by inadvertence or mistake, the deceptive conduct suggests that HHS, the NIH, and particularly NIAID, may have knowingly and deliberately misled the Committee regarding potentially dangerous intramural GOFROC/DURC research. The obstruction and misrepresentations by the agencies involved is also concerning if the experiment, in fact, never occurred because it illustrates the lengths to which NIAID will go to evade outside oversight just for the sake of evasion.

Despite the obstructive behavior by HHS and the NIH, Committee staff believe that NIAID is the agency that bears the most responsibility for misleading the Committee. The NIH has a decentralized structure where the research institutes have a large degree of autonomy in setting research priorities and managing grants, including approval and oversight of biosafety measures. Further, NIAID has the personnel with ﬁrst-hand knowledge of events, subject matter expertise, and control of the documents related to the experiment.