Naming

Instead of naming them after animals like the bird flu or swine flu or monkeypox can we just name them after the Pentagon lab they were made in

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 15, 2024

'Fauci’s institute hid mpox gain-of-function plans from Congress and the media':
"For nearly nine years Anthony Fauci’s institute concealed plans to engineer a pandemic capable mpox virus with a case fatality rate of up to 15 percent, congressional investigators revealed in a new… pic.twitter.com/f19T3GCvI6

— Robin Monotti (@robinmonotti) August 17, 2024

… report Tuesday. In June 2015, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases received formal approval from the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board for experiments expected to engineer an mpox virus with high transmissibility and moderate mortality.

NIAID — the institute Fauci oversaw for nearly four decades and which underwrites most federally funded gain-of-function research — concealed the project’s approval from investigators with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce over the course of a 17 month-long investigation.

The gain-of-function project proposed by NIAID virologist Bernard Moss would splice genes conferring high pathogenicity from the clade I virus into the more transmissible clade II virus. The new “chimeric” (combined) virus could have retained up to a 15 percent fatality rate and a 2.4 reproductive number, a measure of transmissibility indicating every sick person could infect up to 2.4 people on average, giving it pandemic potential.

The committee’s attempts to learn more about the experiment were met with stonewalling." - Emily Kopp