The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted a former senior adviser to Anthony Fauci, the face of the country’s COVID-19 response, for allegedly using a private e-mail account to hide conversations related to federal funding and the origins of the virus.
Prosecutors have accused the former adviser, David Morens, of destroying, concealing and covering up communications, citing an extensive body of e-mails in which he urges others − including Peter Daszak, a pivotal figure in supporting virus research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology − to correspond via a Gmail address that was not subject to federal record requests.
The indictment alleges that Dr. Morens promised back-door communications channels with Dr. Fauci at a time when pointed questions were being asked about links between U.S. government funds and the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in central China. Dr. Daszak, meanwhile, described sending wine as a token of thanks and hinted at a future Michelin-starred dinner.
Dr. Fauci, who has denied allegations that he hid information on the virus, is not accused of wrongdoing.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, shown in 2021, was the face of the U.S.’s COVID-19 response.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
The indictment does not shed new light on the genesis of a virus that killed many millions of people. More than six years after the World Health Organization first declared a pandemic, the question of whether COVID-19 sprung naturally from animals or emerged from a laboratory remains unresolved. Scientific leaders and intelligence agencies alike have offered conflicting views on which scenario is more likely.
But documents released by the Department of Justice this week suggest that at the highest echelons of the U.S. scientific establishment, influential leaders took pains to keep their discussions off government e-mail services in a bid to avoid disclosure through Freedom of Information Act requests.
“It shows that they were afraid and they knowingly violated federal law,” said Alina Chan, a Canadian molecular biologist and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. “At the end of the day, we should hold public servants accountable for trying to hide the truth from the public.”
Dr. Morens, 78, spent 16 years as a senior adviser to Dr. Fauci, who is identified in the document by title but not by name. The indictment also lists an individual as a co-conspirator whose personal details match those of Dr. Daszak, a former president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit that worked on pandemic prevention and received federal funding to study bat coronaviruses.
Dr. Daszak, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been an outspoken critic of what he has called “COVID lab leak conspiracy nonsense.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, by contrast, has long faulted Beijing and the Wuhan lab for the pandemic, frequently calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.” The President has also criticized Dr. Fauci, a former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Last year, Mr. Trump revoked a government security detail for Dr. Fauci, who has received numerous death threats.
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In his second term, Mr. Trump has openly pressed the Department of Justice to act against those he perceives as critics and enemies. The indictment of Dr. Morens “smacks of a selective political prosecution,” said Lawrence Gostin, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
”The wise course would be stiff administrative sanctions against Morens, but not federal criminal prosecution,” he said. “It is time to let go of the COVID origins debate. It does not make the U.S. or the world safer or better prepared.”
Dr. Morens has been scrutinized by Congress, including at a hearing in 2024 when Republicans accused him of “extremely concerning behaviour.” Some Republicans have argued that U.S. funding supported Chinese lab research that led to the pandemic − an assertion for which there is no clear-cut evidence.
But the indictment has won praise from those who have spent years attempting to understand what U.S. public officials knew about COVID-19 and how seriously they treated the possibility that it may have originated in a laboratory. U.S. Right to Know, a non-profit group, has filed five Freedom of Information Act requests for Dr. Morens’s documents and participated in two lawsuits seeking more documents.
“It’s a really sad chapter in American public health, to see this sort of thing go on,” said Gary Ruskin, the group’s executive director and co-founder. “It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t lead to public confidence in our public health system, and that’s really regrettable, too.”
In a 2020 e-mail cited by the Department of Justice, Dr. Morens writes about the need to keep some communications “off of govt email and govt phone text.” He subsequently published a scientific commentary arguing that COVID-19 was natural in origin.
The following year, he wrote that he had “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
In another e-mail, he asked, “do I get a kickback????” after the National Institutes of Health awarded a US$7.5-million grant to EcoHealth Alliance. In mid-2020, Dr. Daszak sent Mr. Morens two bottles of The Prisoner wine with a note thanking him for “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.”
It’s not clear whether those comments were made in jest.
Perhaps, Ms. Chan said, the indictment will draw more attention to what happened and ensure it cannot happen again.
“I think government can do a lot more to unearth and share more information on how the pandemic started,” she said. Bigger steps are needed ”to investigate COVID origins and also improve oversight over research that can kill millions of people.”
