NIH adviser David Morens can’t recall if he deleted
COVID records, laughs off Fauci FOIA evasions
A top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 — and used a “secret back channel” to help Dr. Anthony Fauci and a federal grantee that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, evade transparency.
NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens improperly conducted official government business from his private email account and solicited help from the NIH’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to dodge records requests, according to emails revealed in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which The Post obtained Wednesday.
“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”
The 35-page memo by subcommittee majority staff also suggests Fauci participated “in a conspiracy amongst the highest levels” of the agency to “hide” and potentially “destroy official records regarding the origins of COVID-19.”
“I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail [sic],” he emphasized again in a Nov. 18, 2021, email to EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, whose organization was suspended this month from receiving federal funds for the next three years and who was himself proposed for debarment on Wednesday.
In the most shocking exchange, on May 28, 2021, NIH’s Office of the General Counsel instructed the agency’s FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV,” referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote in an April 21, 2021, email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” read a June 16, 2020, email sent just two months after EcoHealth’s Wuhan grant was initially suspended.
“If i [sic] had to bet, i [sic] would guess that beneath Tony’s macho I-am-not-worried reaction he really is concerned,” Morens also wrote in an April 22, 2021, email about Fauci’s private worries over the EcoHealth grant.
On Oct. 5, 2021, in an email sent days before the NIH would acknowledge EcoHealth funded the risky virus experiments in Wuhan, Daszak leaned on Morens to have “the NIH FoIA [sic] group actually help reduce the scope and make some useful redactions” about the grant.
The 35-page memo by subcommittee majority staff also suggests Fauci, Morens’ former boss at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), participated “in a conspiracy amongst the highest levels” of the agency to “hide” and potentially “destroy official records regarding the origins of COVID-19.”
Morens appeared before the subcommittee Wednesday afternoon to testify about his boasts of destroying “smoking gun” emails about the COVID-19 pandemic, which one former grant fraud investigator told The Post had been “flagrant and intentional misconduct.”
“He has violated the ethical standards of conduct for executive branch employees and has potentially violated criminal law,” said Diane Cutler, an ex-investigator for the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General.
Both Republicans and Democrats on the panel were united in their denunciations of Morens.
“The information contained in these 30,000 pages of emails are deeply concerning, and in my opinion reflects poorly upon Dr. Morens and the Office of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease under Dr. Fauci’s leadership and the NIH under Dr. Francis Collins,” Subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in his opening remarks.
“Dr. Fauci’s NIAID was unfortunately less pristine than so many, including the media, would have had us all believe,” he added.
Please continue reading at: Ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.)
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