A senior scientific adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said he used a personal email account to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests and even deleted some emails during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to federal records obtained by House investigators.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealed the emails Thursday, saying that Dr. David Morens, a 25-year National Institutes of Health veteran who served under retired NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci, potentially broke the law.
In one alarming exchange, Morens told Bloomberg reporter Jason Gale that the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services prohibited him from “talk[ing] about [COVID] ‘origins’ on the record,” but that he had recently been given latitude to discuss the matter — as long as he didn’t mention his boss.
“Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” Morens said in the July 29, 2021, email.
The emails — first published by The Intercept — show messages to a group of scientists who published a now-infamous paper in Nature Medicine that attempted to debunk the so-called “lab leak theory,” including the lead author Dr. Kristian Andersen.
On Sept. 7, 2021, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak also wrote to Morens about The Intercept’s reporting on coronavirus research in Chinese labs, saying: “The lab leakers are already stirring up bulls–t lines of attack that will bring more negative publicity our way — which is what this is about — a way to line up the [gain-of-function] attack on Fauci, or the ‘risky research’ attack on all of us.”
“Do not rule out suing these a–holes for slander,” Morens replied, referring to The Intercept report.
EcoHealth Alliance sent more than $2 million in subgrants from NIH and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Government Accountability Office found earlier this month.
