A House subcommittee investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic is requesting access to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal email and cell phone records after a former adviser to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) testified before Congress last week that there were “secret back-channel” communications between him and Fauci.
House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) Wednesday’s Letter Fauci’s lawyers have requested personal records from Jan. 1, 2020 to the present that may show the former NIAID director concealing information about COVID’s origins.
Wenstrup also questioned the records of the now-suspended federal grant recipient EcoHealth Alliance and the now-disbarred Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Records must be submitted by June 12th.
Fauci has since retired, but is scheduled to appear before the COVID Subcommittee on June 3 to answer tough questions about a multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to EcoHealth, which funded risky gain-of-function research at the WIV before the pandemic.
Dr. David Morens of the NIAID served as Dr. Fauci’s top adviser from 1998 to 2022, but is currently on leave.
A trove of emails released by a House subcommittee show that Morens bragged about deleting “critical evidence” about COVID-19 and using a personal email account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from journalists.
“[T]No need to worry about FOIA, you can send the info to Tony’s private Gmail [sic]”or gave it to him at work or at home,” Morens said in an April 21, 2021 email, suggesting Fauci was involved in a so-called “secret back channel.”
“He’s smart enough not to let his coworkers send him anything that could get him in trouble,” Morens said of attempts to shield his boss.
In damning testimony before Wenstrup’s committee on May 22, Morens said the incriminating email was a “joke” but later acknowledged that he “may have sent” the information to Fauci’s personal email account.
The comments raised “serious concerns that public health officials are intentionally concealing information and acting as if they are not accountable to the American people they serve,” the subcommittee said in a press release.
Fauci, former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak all deny that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research at the WIV.
But in testimony before the subcommittee earlier this month, NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak acknowledged that federal funding had in fact been used for such experiments.
The NIH donated more than $500,000 to EcoHealth, a Manhattan-based public health nonprofit that funded the WIV from 2014 to 2019 for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Emergence of Bat Coronaviruses.”
The project “involved genetic experiments that combined naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with the SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybrid (also called chimeric) coronavirus strains,” it said. Government Accountability Office Report.
In an October 2021 letter, Tabak informed Congress that the experiments had resulted in a modified virus that was 10,000 times more infectious, violating the terms of EcoHealth’s grant.
He noted that “the viral sequence is genetically very distant from COVID-19,” but other EcoHealth grant applications have since come under scrutiny for genetic similarities to SARS-CoV-2.
The FBI, the Department of Energy, former public health officials and former leaders of U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded in recent months that COVID-19 probably leaked from a laboratory.
Daszak said in testimony before a House COVID subcommittee this month that the U.S. had not received any virus sequences from the Wuhan lab before the pandemic began.
EcoHealth’s grant funding was suspended in 2020 and reinstated in 2023, but its nonprofit activities were suspended earlier this month following Daszak’s congressional testimony and a proposal for formal decertification was made.
The House COVID Subcommittee recommended that the Department of Justice bring criminal charges against EcoHealth and Daszak for making multiple false statements about the grant funding.
Wenstrup told The Washington Post last week that Morens also faces criminal charges for possibly making false statements to Congress about FOIA evasion and efforts to shield Fauci and EcoHealth.
An email from Morens to Daszak dated Oct. 25, 2021, obtained by the subcommittee also mentions Collins’ involvement.
“Peter, because of what Tony has said to me many times recently and what Francis has spoken out loud over the last five days, they are trying to protect you and in turn protect their own reputation,” Morens wrote.
