These latest revelations follow reporting last week that Tony Fauci lied to the New York Times about his involvement in a Nature Medicine piece that advanced the theory that the pandemic could not have started in a lab Fauci himself was funding in Wuhan, China.

The House began the investigation following a September 2022 article in Science Magazine that reported on the dangers of monkeypox virus, spreading across the globe with the potential to adapt to humans and become more transmissible or deadly. Bernard Moss, a veteran poxvirus researcher at the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Science Magazine that monkeypox evolves to replicate faster in humans.

Science noted that Moss had begun gain-of-function experiments—swapping out genes from various variants—to understand why some are more dangerous or transmissible than others.