A former top adviser to ex-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who bragged about deleting “smoking gun” emails related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, will be grilled Wednesday by Congress.
Ex-NIAID senior scientific adviser Dr. David Morens will testify about his potential violations of federal record-keeping laws and attempts to obstruct a House investigation into the government’s pandemic response.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has subpoenaed Morens, who served under Fauci from 1998 to 2022, for “confidential” emails about lab biosafety and other communications related to a controversial National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funneled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that Morens sent from his private account.
Earlier emails obtained by the House subcommittee also showed Morens used the private email address to dodge Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from media.
Morens wrote in a Sept. 9, 2021, email that he would “always communicate on gmail [sic] because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly” and “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
In a tense hearing last week with NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak, House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) revealed that Morens had informed the now-suspended grant recipient for the Wuhan lab funding that he learned “how to make emails disappear” from FOIA searches.
“’I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts. So I think we are all safe,’” Comer read into the record from one email exchange with EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak.
“‘Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail,’” Comer said continuing to read before asking Tabak, “Is that consistent with NIH document retention policies?”
“It is not,” Tabak said, adding with alarm that he “certainly hope[d]” Morens hadn’t been coached by the NIH FOIA office to evade the requests.
“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns,” Morens wrote in another message read aloud by Comer. “And if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails. And if we found them we would delete them.”
EcoHealth received more than $4 million from NIH to conduct research on bat coronaviruses, and sent more than half a million dollars of that funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for risky gain-of-function research between 2014 and 2021.
Earlier this month, Republicans and Democrats on the COVID subcommittee grilled Daszak and recommended the Justice Department criminally investigate him for having given potentially false testimony to the subcommittee about the EcoHealth grant.
The US Department of Health and Human Services later suspended and proposed for debarment the Manhattan-based nonprofit for failing to hand over documents about the research for years and approving of experiments that “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety.”
Tabak admitted in his testimony last week that those experiments constituted gain-of-function research after years of denials from himself, Fauci, ex-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and others.
One of Morens’ emails obtained by the House COVID panel shows the NIH adviser discussing how Fauci was preparing to respond to accusations that the Wuhan research lab used substandard biosafety levels.
Talking points shared with Fauci brushed off the suggestion that the chimeric virus created by the Wuhan experiments caused the COVID-19 pandemic, but other private emails released later by EcoHealth show Daszak in April 2020 acknowledging his organization had “15,000 samples in freezers in Wuhan.”
In his congressional testimony earlier this month, Daszak also revealed that he had not received any sequences of viruses from the Chinese lab since before the pandemic.
Tabak informed Congress in October 2021 that the EcoHealth grant created a virus “genetically very distant” from COVID-19 — but other proposals by the disgraced grantee have since been raised as “smoking gun” evidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan.
The FBI, Energy Department and several former federal officials — including ex-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield — have determined COVID-19 most likely escaped through a lab accident.
House COVID subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) accused Morens earlier this month of trying to delay his public hearing with the subcommittee until after Fauci delivers his own testimony on the pandemic response, currently scheduled for June 3.
Morens is currently on administrative leave after Wenstrup drew attention to his alleged record violations last year.
