Dr. Anthony Fauci distanced himself from his former adviser, Dr. David Morens, during his congressional testimony on Monday, repeatedly denying that he had any involvement in or knowledge of Morens’s efforts to evade transparency by conducting official business on his personal email account.
Morens, who served as Fauci’s senior adviser during his time leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used his private email account to discuss the origins of Covid-19 with EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak and deleted the related correspondence, according to emails released last month by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The series of emails shows Morens was concerned about the correspondence being made public via the Freedom of Information Act.
Fauci denied any knowledge of or involvement in his adviser’s actions.
“With respect to his recent testimony before this subcommittee, I knew nothing of Dr. Moren’s 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.”
The retired public-health official further distanced himself from Morens’s actions by asserting “that to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email.”
As EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak came under scrutiny during the pandemic for their role in funneling NIH funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, Morens began taking steps to avoid public scrutiny.
In one February 2021 email, Morens wrote that he “learned from our foia lady here how to make most emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe,” adding that he “deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.” In November of that year, Morens wrote that “his gmail is now safe from FOIA” and asked that “NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail.” He had previously written that he “learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.”
Asked about that email during his congressional testimony last month, Morens insisted that it was sent in jest and that the woman he referred to as “foia lady” simply reassured him that personal correspondence would not be produced in response to FOIA requests.
In another email, Morens described how, based on his conversations with Fauci, he believed NIH officials were “protecting” Daszak from public scrutiny surrounding the role that EcoHealth played in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
“I never spoke about protecting him,” Fauci said under oath when asked about that email.
“I may have mentioned Dr. Daszak, but I never spoke about protecting him,” he added. “I don’t know where he got that, but that’s not true.”
In another message, Morens told a scientist that he could connect researchers with Fauci “through a backchannel.” Addressing lawmakers on Monday, Fauci denied the existence of any communications backchannel. “I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about. There is no backchannel at NIAID,” Fauci told Congress.
During a lengthy line of questioning from the Democratic committee staff’s legal counsel, the former NIAID director affirmed that Morens had a conflict of interest with EcoHealth’s Daszak by “helping him in response to an NIH issue.”
“He definitely had a conflict,” Fauci said, noting he did not know that at the time.
Mounting circumstantial evidence — in the form of FOIA public records, digital information in online databases, scientific papers analyzing the coronavirus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggest that Covid emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci said Monday that he maintains an “open mind” on the question of Covid’s origins, but emails obtained by the Covid subcommittee suggest that Fauci was behind the drafting of a paper dismissing the lab-leak theory in February 2020. Days after the paper was published, Fauci referred reporters to it without disclosing that he was involved in its drafting.
Fauci’s latest congressional testimony comes days after the coronavirus subcommittee released the official transcript of his two-day, closed-door testimony in January. The transcript showed Fauci conceding that the six-foot social-distancing guidelines “sort of just appeared” during the early days of the pandemic and admitted there was a “possibility” that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan rather than from an animal reservoir at the city’s seafood market.