Video: Top NIH Adviser Deleted Records, Used Secret Back Channels to Help Fauci Evade COVID Transparency
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].”
It's a felony to destroy records. It's a felony to destroy evidence. Without question, Morens has admitted in his emails that he was destroying evidence. David Morens is Anthony Fauci's Michael Cohen, he's the fixer. pic.twitter.com/vq9P1XoxPy
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) May 22, 2024
“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.
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.”
“[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,” Fauci’s adviser 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 Morens 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.
Another shocking exchange on May 28, 2021, shows that NIH’s Office of the General Counsel instructed the agency’s FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV.”
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.
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 office to dodge records requests.
Alarmingly, the NIH adviser lightheartedly discussed getting “a kickback” for his assistance to the disgraced Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, which funded experiments on novel bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2014 and 2021.
“Do I get a kickback???? Too much fooking money,” Morens joked with Daszak after EcoHealth secured a $7.5 million grant in August 2020. “I just hope it doesn’t culminate in 5 years in Federal jail, or even Chinese ‘re-education camp.'”
Many of the emails between Morens and Daszak privileged EcoHealth with “inside information” about the status of grants, including a more than $4 million NIH award for a controversial project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
That project, which was briefly suspended during the pandemic and then reinstated in 2023, conducted risky gain-of-function experiments on SARS-like viruses that made them 10,000 times more infectious, in violation of the NIH grant’s terms.
NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak finally confirmed the experiments occurred — after more than four years of denials — in sworn congressional testimony last week.
Tabak has dismissed the idea that the gain-of-function research led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 — but another EcoHealth grant proposal has drawn scrutiny for its similarity to COVID-19.
Daszak, who has downplayed the role of Chinese researchers in engineering viruses at substandard biosafety levels, also revealed in a House COVID panel hearing earlier this month that he had not received viral sequences from the Wuhan Institute of Virology since before the pandemic began.
The FBI, Energy Department, ex-cabinet officials and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Robert Redfield have said the most likely explanation for COVID-19 is that it escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
Morens and Daszak nevertheless mocked proponents of the lab-leak theory, including Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), as “nutters” and conspiracy theorists in their email correspondence.
Other emails show Morens discussing his drinking habits and making misogynistic remarks.
In a Nov. 18, 2021, email, he revealed that Fauci helped then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky land her job — before suggesting that he believed the reason for it was “she does wear a skirt.”
“Beverage is always good, and best delivered by a blonde nymphomaniac, if you can manage that. Actually, at my age I’ll take a brunette. Even a red head. Any hair at all,” he confided to Daszak in another Dec. 11, 2020, email.
In yet another message, Morens and Daszak mocked Paul for having been told to “get f–ked” by someone who called in to a town hall event.
“Obviously, one doesn’t condone this base level of public discourse, but I find myself curiously buoyed by it after his months of continued attacks,” Daszak said of Paul, who sparred with Fauci over the Wuhan funding in high-profile hearings.
“He probably doesn’t know how to F*%$ himself, as he clearly [sic] failed anatomy. And all the other med school subjects,” Morens replied, referencing Paul’s work as an ophthalmologist.
Morens, who worked under Fauci from 1998 to 2022, produced more than 30,000 pages of emails and other documents to the subcommittee in response to subpoenas and has been interviewed twice by panel members.
“The evidence presented throughout this memorandum establishes that Dr. Morens likely provided false testimony to the Select Subcommittee,” the majority staff memo concludes.
The NIH adviser may have also received “a kickback” for his assistance to the disgraced EcoHealth Alliance,
which funded experiments on novel bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2014 and 2021.
“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.
The NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BREAKING: Bombshell messages revealing Dr. Fauci’s top adviser bragging about making emails disappear. pic.twitter.com/MiWFsPa982
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) May 22, 2024
