Congress seeks emails suggesting Fauci worked behind the scene to discredit COVID lab leak stories

By zoeysky // 2023-07-12

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A select House subcommittee investigating the response to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) wants David Morens to produce the subpoenaed materials he hid from Congress using his personal email and phone. These materials purportedly suggest that Dr. Anthony Fauci worked behind the scene to discredit COVID lab leak stories. Morens is a senior scientific adviser to Fauci when the latter was still the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Ohio Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, has asked Morens to surrender documents and communications from his personal email and cellphone. The request follows information suggesting that Morens is intentionally using non-government communications to avoid having to disclose certain materials under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), thereby violating federal recordkeeping laws. The Intercept previously published dozens of pages of emails, including Morens, already submitted to the subcommittee. The documents also included emails from scientists who were also seeking to discredit COVID-19 lab leak theories. There were emails from:

Peter Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance president whose organization funneled taxpayer-funded grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the primary suspected source of a lab leak.
Kristian Andersen from the Scripps Research Institute, who initially told Fauci that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, could have been "potentially" engineered.
Angela Rasmussen from Canada's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, who warned that entertaining the lab leak could harm U.S.-China relations.

On September 9, 2021, Morens notified the scientists he may "have to occasionally email from my NIH [National Institutes of Health] account" until his hacked Gmail account, which does not connect to his NIH-issued computer, is fixed. Morens also wrote that he prefers using his Gmail account to send and reply to emails because his NIH email is "FOIA'd constantly."

Fauci contributed to paper that dismissed lab leak theory

In a July 29, 2021 exchange with Jason Gale, a Bloomberg News reporter for a story on the origins of COVID-19, Morens wrote that the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not allow him to talk on the record about the pandemic's origins for several months. But one day, his "boss Tony" asked him to discuss its origins with National Geographic. "Tony" was likely referring to Fauci. In the email, Morens also talked about his boss' decision, which he thinks suggests that the government is lightening up. However, "Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories." Previously released exchanges suggest Fauci and then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins both secretly contributed to a March 2020 Nature Medicine paper led by Andersen that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of the pandemic. Fauci later cited this paper during a press conference at the White House. Wenstrup chastised Morens for telling National Geographic that searching for the "progenitor virus" may have already gone from "doing due diligence to wasting time and being crazy." He added that this raises doubt about whether this was the narrative Fauci approved Morens to say. Morens also suggested that his fellow scientists use strategic lawsuits to silence both critical scientists, such as Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, and journalists writing about China's COVID-19 research. (Related: Sen. Rand Paul: COVID lab leak among the greatest coverups in modern medical history.) In a September 7, 2021 email referring to an Intercept report, Daszak complained that FOIA requests were straining EcoHealth staff. He also said that "lab leakers" were promoting "lines of attack that will bring more negative publicity" against Fauci and the other scientists involved in promoting gain-of-function research that could make viruses more dangerous. Morens replied and encouraged them to sue the lab leakers for "slander," supposedly referring to libel. According to Wenstrup, Morens' actions suggest that a government official like him is "encouraging litigation against the press for reporting that does not follow public health bureaucrats' pre-conceived narrative. Westrup also called Morens' actions "unacceptable." The subcommittee chairman was also disturbed that Morens referred to Ebright and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Alina Chan as "harmful demagogues," after a journalist wrote that the NIH-funded Chinese research qualified as a gain of function. Visit Pandemic.news for more articles about COVID-19. Watch the video below to know more about Morens' and Fauci's actions amid the pandemic. This video is from the Wellness Forum Health channel on Brighteon.com.

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Fauci contributed to paper that dismissed lab leak theory

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