House coronavirus subcommittee has requested materials David Morens used a transcribed interview and his personal email to remain anonymous. A Fauci advisor proposed suing detractors in order to silence them.
A senior scientist who advised Dr. Anthony Fauci when he was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is being questioned by a select House panel investigating the coronavirus pandemic because it has been suggested that Fauci attempted to subtly discredit the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
The chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Ohio GOP Rep. Brad Wenstrup, has requested that adviser David Morens turn over documents and communications from his personal email and cellphone because there is evidence that Morens is attempting to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act and breaking federal record-keeping laws by using non-government communications.
The subcommittee requests a transcript of the interview on August 2 because the information is allegedly in Morens’ emails.
The Intercept published dozens of pages of emails including Morens, already obtained by the subcommittee, with scientists who were also seeking to discredit lab leak.
They include EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, whose organization funneled U.S. grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the suspected source of a lab leak; Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute, who initially told Fauci SARS-CoV-2 looked “potentially” engineered; and Angela Rasmussen of Canada’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, who warned that entertaining lab leak could harm U.S.-China relations.
Morens notified the scientists Sept. 9, 2021, that “I may have to occasionally email from my [National Institutes of Health] account” until his hacked Gmail account, which does not connect to “my NIH computer,” is fixed.
“As you know, I try to always communicate on Gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’D constantly,” his email says. The other scientists can still email him, and “I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
For “many months,” Morens claimed, the White House and Department of Health and Human Services refused to give him permission to speak on the record about origins in a July 29, 2021 conversation with Bloomberg News reporter Jason Gale for a story on COVID origins.
“But today, to my total surprise, my boss Tony actually ASKED me” to do this with National Geographic,” Morens said, likely referring to Fauci. “| interpret this to mean that our government is lightening up but that Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.”
According to previously made public communications, Fauci and the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, secretly supported a March 2020 Nature Medicine paper led by Andersen that ruled out the possibility of a lab leak. Later, during a press conference at the White House, Fauci cited the paper.
Wenstrup flogged Morens for telling National Geographic that searching for the “progenitor virus” may have already crossed over from “doing due diligence to wasting time and being crazy.” According to the chairman, “This raises the question of whether this was the narrative Dr. Fauci approved you to say.”
In order to silence critics like Richard Ebright of Rutgers University and journalists who were covering China’s coronavirus research, Morens advised his colleagues to use legal strategy.
In a Sept. 7, 2021, email referring to such an Intercept report, Daszak complained that FOIA requests were straining EcoHealth staff and that “lab leakers” were promoting “lines of attack that will bring more negative publicity” against Fauci and “all of us” for promoting gain-of-function research that could make viruses more dangerous.
“Do not rule out suing” them for “slander,” Morens said, apparently referring to libel.
Morens’ email footer included his position in NIAID’s Office of the Director. “This gives the appearance of a government official encouraging litigation against the press for reporting that does not follow public health bureaucrats’ pre-conceived narrative and is unacceptable,” Wenstrup told Morens.
Requests for NIAID’s response to Wenstrup and its characterization of Morens’ emails were not met with a response.
The subcommittee chairman was also disturbed that Morens referred to Ebright and MIT Broad Institute adviser Alina Chan as “harmful demagogues,” in connection with a journalist purportedly conveying their take that NIH-funded Chinese research qualified as gain of function.
“They need to be called out,” Morens wrote in a typo-ridden email. “Because i am in govemment i can only fo this off the record, but have done do again and again.” Including these scientists’ views in balanced stories is journalists giving “equal time and space” to a Holocaust survivor and “Nazi murderer,” he said.
Morens went so far as using his NIH email to trash Chan for research papers he called “biased, cherry-picked, and not the work of a scientist with integrity.”
“These all raise serious concerns about your objectivity while stationed” in Fauci’s office at NIAID, which “obligates billions of dollars annually,” Wenstrup said. The subcommittee will ask “whether you made or influenced any funding decisions based on your personal motives or biases towards scientists.”
The letter requests Moren turn over materials related to the “drafting, publication, or critical reception” of several academic publications related to COVID origins.
It also requests his communications with Fauci, Collins, and other NIH officials as well as scientists engaged in alleged gain of function research, including texts he exchanged with them about the Wuhan lab, EcoHealth, and COVID origins dating back to November 1, 2019.
Cliff Taylor
July 3, 2023 at 11:40 pm
Dr Fauci should be charged with mass murder and genocide.