Headline Roundup • May 23rd, 2024
Fauci Adviser Accused of Deleting Emails on COVID-19 Origins
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Congress questioned National Institutes of Health (NIH) official David Morens on Wednesday over his efforts to dodge inquiries about COVID-19's origins.
The Details: A memo from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic accuses Morens of "undermining the operations of the U.S. government, unlawfully deleting federal COVID-19 records, using a personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and repeatedly acting unbecoming of a federal employee." It cites emails in which Morens described the ability to "make emails disappear" and being "smart enough to know to never have smoking guns."
Key Quotes: “It is not anti-science to hold you accountable,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) told Morens on Wednesday. “I was not aware that anything I deleted like emails was a federal record,” Morens said.
For Context: Morens was a top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. His emails also include discussions of cover-ups with Peter Daszak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which was conducting coronavirus research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) when the pandemic began. In the past week, the U.S. halted funding to Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, saying he failed to properly report on potential high-risk research. EcoHealth Alliance's coronavirus research at WIV is central to the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
How the Media Covered It: Sources across the spectrum framed Morens negatively. Right-rated outlets highlighted the news more prominently.
Featured Coverage of this Story
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
David Morens had a very bad day.
At the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, the longtime National Institutes of Health official encouraged colleagues to evade federal records requirements, claiming that shifting sensitive covid conversations to personal email and deleting messages would protect his high-profile former boss Anthony S. Fauci and others from unwanted scrutiny.
It was spectacularly bad — and wrong — advice. And it brought the wrath of Congress down on Morens yesterday.
The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 35-page memo presenting what they say is overwhelming evidence that David Morens, a top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19.
The memo claims Morens unlawfully deleted emails and used a “secret back channel” to evade transparency.
“(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, which was obtained by...
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...
.png)
