I chuckled at how Dr. Anthony Fauci tried to distance himself in congressional testimony today from his long-time “senior adviser” David M. Morens — who apparently has stated in emails that he knew how to avoid FOIA requests. As reported by NR’s David Zimmermann, Fauci said of his long-time colleague :
“With respect to his recent testimony before this subcommittee, I knew nothing of Dr. Morens’ actions regarding Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth, or his emails,” Fauci said. “It is important to point out for the record that despite his title, and even though he was helpful to me in writing scientific papers, Dr. Morens was not an adviser to me on institute policy or other substantive issues.”
I don’t know if he was an “adviser” on those matters, but Morens wasn’t just casually “helpful” to Fauci over the years in writing science papers, as his testimony seems to me to imply. Rather, according to ResearchGate (assuming my count is correct), since 2007 the two have shared bylines — sometimes with others — at least 45 times.
Some of these articles were minor contributions, such as tributes to deceased colleagues. But many of them were very detailed scientific papers that would have required quite a bit of close collaborative work to complete. For example, an advocacy column the two co-authored in 2020 for the science journal Cell, “Emerging Pandemic Disease: How We Got to Covid 19,” not only is filled to the brim with data but also urges the World Health Organization to be given legal power to “remake the infrastructure of human existence.” That paper was not casually undertaken, to say the least.
What does this mean? Maybe not much. But the two were hardly strangers in the night.