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].”
“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.
Ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) echoed Wenstrup’s remarks in calling Morens’ behavior was “deeply troubling” — but cautioned the emails were “not a breakthrough moment in actually understanding the actual origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“What troubles me most about your conduct, Dr. Morens, is the extent to which it so willingly betrays decades of dedication, diligence and decorum from the thousands of federal scientists and public health workers who came before you, who have served alongside you and who will serve on into the future,” Ruiz said.
“It is not anti-science to hold you accountable for defying the public’s trust and misusing official resources.”
Morens, who is currently on administrative leave, characterized the emails as “snarky” and “profane” — but repeatedly said he could not recall the circumstances behind the messages as members read them into the congressional record.
The NIAID senior scientific adviser even laughed off damning emails of his “back channel” talks with Fauci as a “joke” and insisted they had nothing to do with FOIA queries.
“I don’t remember,” Morens said when asked by House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) about the secretive discussions. “It’s possible … He and I usually never talked about that kind of stuff. It would be very unusual if it happened.”
When pressed, Morens denied several times that he conducted official business on his personal email account or deleted records, only to later hedge his remarks and point to his efforts to defend Daszak against death threats.
“I was not aware that anything I deleted like emails was a federal record,” Morens said at one point.
“I have no involvements in any grants, in any aspects of any grants,” he said at another — despite having taken credit in emails for helping EcoHealth obtain federal funding and helping defend it as a grantee to NIH officials.
“I had a friend, a personal friend, who was in danger of being murdered,” Morens said of Daszak at another point.
But at yet another point, Morens threw his “friend” under the bus, quoting somebody who had told him of the controversial EcoHealth president: “Peter’s his own worst enemy because he made some mistakes on that grant.”
“I believe you have lied here today to Congress,” said an equally bewildered Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.).
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.”
Alarmingly, the emails released Wednesday show Morens lightheartedly discussed getting “a kickback” for his assistance to the disgraced Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, which funded experiments on novel bat coronaviruses at the WIV 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.’”
Morens denied having been compensated and described the email as employing “typical black humor between people like Peter and me and other folks who show up in these emails.”
“Well, I don’t think any of us think this it’s a funny joke,” Staten Island GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis shot back. “You are representing the United State government, you’re representing an agency and you’re asking a grantee, ‘Do I get a kickback?’”
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 messages 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.”
“I find your comments to be disgusting,” Rep. Mariannete Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) told Morens Wednesday about that remark.
“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 [sic]. 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 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When asked after the hearing whether Morens opened himself to criminal prosecution based on his false statements, Wenstrup told reporters: “Yes.”
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, agreed Morens should be referred for prosecution based on his “conspiracy to defraud, obstruction of investigation, misuse of federal resources, and perjury.”
“More important, the series of email messages read by Reps. Debbie Lesko and Rich McCormick [R-Ga.] strongly suggest that Morens committed these crimes on behalf of, and with the knowledge, approval, and participation of, his supervisor, former NIAID Director Fauci,” Ebright added.
“Like many of my colleagues, I owe my career to NIH-funded research, and I believe we owe the public much more than an apology if we hope to maintain support for publicly funded science—the public deserves accountability,” said Dr. Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers and co-founder of the nonprofit Biosafety Now.
“The NIH is supposed to be a trusted part of our nation’s healthcare system and economy. Morens’ conduct is wholly inconsistent with the NIH’s core mission and underscores the importance of appointing leaders who act in the public interest—the exact opposite of what we have had under [former NIH Director Francis] Collins and Fauci.”
