Lawmakers investigating the origins of COVID-19 recently revealed that Dr. David Morens, a senior advisor to Anthony Fauci from 1998 to 2022, boasted about methods to “make emails disappear” and eliminate “smoking guns” to evade scrutiny. Some of Morens’ emails, obtained through a congressional subpoena, were read aloud by House Oversight Chairman James Comer during a hearing.
The subcommittee has been investigating Fauci and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since it was determined that the NAID financed EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit from New York City, for its gain of function research, which was ultimately responsible for COVID-19.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, EcoHealth failed to properly oversee the research after subcontracting it to a Chinese lab in Wuhan, leading to an accident that caused the pandemic.
Chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, representative Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), expressed concerns that the former Fauci advisor and Peter Daszak, president of the Ecohealth Alliance, actively hid communications by deleting federal records. Wenstrup points to messages from Morens that discussed the advisor’s use of personal emails instead of governmental ones to hide his tracks and deleting messages to evade detection.
The ongoing investigation uncovered directions from Morens to communicate via Gmail because his NIH mail was “FOIA’d constantly.” He advised Daszak to send messages to his personal accounts so he could “delete anything” he didn’t want to “see in the New York Times.”
Wenstrup issued subpoenas for Morens’s Gmail correspondence regarding COVID-19’s origins and ordered him to testify before the subcommittee. Morens’s emails were read aloud to former NIH acting director Lawrence Tabak during a hearing. Investigators asked Tabak if Moren’s messages were “consistent with NIH document retention policies,” to which Tabak answered they were not.
The nonprofit health research organization U.S. Right to Know has been engaged in a legal struggle against the NIH to obtain officials’ emails regarding the origins of COVID-19. Gary Ruskin, U.S. Right to Know’s executive director, observed that he had never seen any federal agency fight requests for public records as much as the NIH. Ruskin criticized the NIH for concealing crucial information about COVID-19 origins, stating that the agency’s behavior has been “disgraceful.”
Morens, under pressure, handed over numerous emails to the Select Subcommittee and will soon testify about deleting emails and conducting official business via Gmail. The director suggested that after this testimony, the appropriate consequences of Morens’ actions “against democracy” would become more apparent to Congress and the public.
One shocking email between Morens and Daszak revealed that Morens was knowingly evading FOIA requests by deleting messages. “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts,” Morens wrote, adding that he deleted earlier emails after he sent them to Gmail. “So, I think we are safe.”
A later message from Morens confirmed that he was actively deleting emails. He wrote that he was too smart to leave “smoking guns” and that he would never leave them in his messages. He added that such messages would be deleted.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently decided to suspend federal funding for EcoHealth Alliance following the discovery of EcoHealth Alliance’s collaboration with a virology laboratory in China, which was implicated in a possible leak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
The HHS cited several reasons for the suspension, including EcoHealth’s failure to adequately oversee research activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which received funding as a subrecipient of a federal grant awarded to EcoHealth by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Moreover, during a hearing on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, EcoHealth’s president Daszak faced criticism from both Republican and Democratic representatives, with concerns raised about risky research practices and transparency issues within the organization.
In addition to the funding suspension, the HHS proposed to debar EcoHealth Alliance from future federal funding, signaling a more definitive halt of grant money typically reserved for severe violations.
EcoHealth Alliance expressed disappointment with the decision and intends to contest the proposed debarment.
