The Walls Are Closing in on Fauci
“It is not anti-science to hold you accountable,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) told Fauci adviser David Morens during a congressional hearing last week on an apparent conspiracy to avoid FOIA requests.
The effort to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID-19 is more than four years in the making. And while shockingly little progress has been made, evidence suggests that a plot to conceal answers is unraveling before our eyes.
The latest evidence comes from David Morens, a top adviser to former National Institutes of Health Director Anthony Fauci, who on Wednesday testified before the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about emails he sent to colleagues concerning Freedom of Information Act requests.
“I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts,” Morens wrote. “So I think we are all safe.”
While questioning Morens, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed shock and dismay over the emails as well as Morens’s repeated excuses and dissembling.
“Sir, I think you’re going to be haunted by your testimony today,” said Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD).
Morens may not be the only one haunted.
In several emails, Morens referenced “Tony,” Dr. Fauci, with whom he claimed to have a “secret backchannel.”
“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote to Peter Daszak.
Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, was the recipient of a multimillion-dollar NIH grant to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab many government agencies, including the FBI, believe was the likely source of COVID-19.
The fact that EcoHealth Alliance was conducting risky experiments on coronaviruses at Wuhan with NIH dollars, something Fauci had repeatedly denied, explains why the NIH might have felt a need to deliberate in secret. Emails say that the NIH was working to protect EcoHealth Alliance’s and the NIH’s reputations.
“Peter, from Tony’s recent numerous comments to me … they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputation,” Morens wrote.
At least for some, this protection apparently extended to hiding communications from the public and deleting correspondences to conceal the truth from the public.
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) read aloud no fewer than half a dozen emails written by Morens in which he discussed not just how to avoid FOIA but how to “erase” emails so they could not be retrieved.
Just who will be implicated in the fallout from the apparent conspiracy to hide the truth is unclear, but it’s not a trivial question, considering how the matter has been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation. (Willfully avoiding FOIA is a federal crime.)
At least one person, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has frequently sparred with Fauci, said the conspiracy goes higher than Morens.
“I believe Anthony Fauci was in charge of the entire conspiracy,” Paul said.
For his part, Morens told lawmakers he had no recollection of talking with Fauci about emails. Evidence, however, suggests that Morens is either lying or suffering from a fuzzy memory.
In one June 2021 email to a recipient whose name is redacted, Morens discussed an email correspondence between himself and Daszak that he “erased long ago,” adding, “I feel pretty sure that Tony’s was too.”
How Morens could be “pretty sure” Fauci had deleted the email in question without ever having discussed emails with the former NIH director is a question that investigators might ponder.
Whether justice will be delivered to those involved in the effort to avoid oversight and deflect scrutiny from EcoHealth Alliance’s research at Wuhan is uncertain. What’s clear is that the NIH is a broken institution.
The relationship between Daszak and Morens reeks of cronyism, and it includes Morens editing grant application materials for Daszak and then wondering if any “kickbacks” would be coming his way.
It’s easy to believe that the worst part of big government is its inefficiency. “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,” Milton Friedman famously quipped, “in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Yet the costs of government gigantism go beyond dollars and cents. It’s now apparent that the NIH, freed from the market forces that ensure scarce resources are allocated efficiently, was spraying money around in reckless fashion without proper oversight.
With its $47 billion budget, the NIH was doling out grants to fund research it clearly should not have been funding. And instead of coming clean following the emergence of COVID-19, officials at the NIH leveraged its power and resources to silence critics, marginalize other scientists, and accuse anyone who opposed NIH policies of being “anti-science.”
Fortunately, the political cover the NIH has enjoyed up to this point seems to be vanishing.
“It is not anti-science to hold you accountable,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA), the panel’s top Democrat, flatly told Morens.
We’ll see whether these words also apply to Fauci, who is scheduled to appear before Congress on June 3. The wheels of justice turn slowly, they say. We may soon learn whether, in Washington, they still turn at all.
This article originally appeared on The Washington Examiner.
March 19, 2018
Anthony Fauci, MD
National Institutes of Health
Director, National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Building 31, National Institutes of Health 31 Center Drive, Room 7A03
Bethesda, MD 20892-2520
Dear Dr. Fauci,
The NIH All of Us Research Program is a historic effort to gather data from over a million participants to accelerate research and improve health. Lessons from the All of Us (AoU) Program will transform the practice of medicine from a one-size- fits-all paradigm to a more individualized approach. Currently readying for its national launch, AoU Program research will help link the impacts of environmental exposure, diet, and genetics to our understanding of health and disease, which will subsequently impact recommendations for treatment and care.
On March 21-23, NIH is holding a stakeholder-driven All of Us Research Priorities Workshop to identify key requirements for advancing precision medicine research at NIH. The program is seeking public input on potential research questions or use cases. Other funders (including other NIH Institutes and Centers) may consider use cases that are not incorporated into the All of Us protocol for additional funding opportunities. As these historic efforts get underway, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) urges the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to promote infectious diseases (ID) research considerations as a critical component of the AoU Research Program, and also consider ways to link current and future Institute efforts with program data.
Precision medicine and ID research
Since the advent of the All of Us Research Program, IDSA has been ramping up our ID precision medicine efforts and working to establish infectious diseases as an AoU research priority. In 2016, the Society formed a working group that surveyed the landscape of infections and precision medicine to consider research recommendations at the intersection of both fields.
IDSA has also been invited to participate in the upcoming All of Us Research Priorities Workshop. IDSA’s submitted use cases to the public portal may be found here, here, and here. Attendees will review submitted use cases, identify gaps, create new use cases, and identify data types common across multiple use
PAGE 2—IDSA Comments to NIAID RE NIH All of Us Research Priorities
cases. Factors that will determine whether a use case becomes part of the protocol include impact, scope, scalability, budget, and value to participants. NIH will make all use cases available on the All of Us website as a searchable reference and as a principal database for informing the program’s plans.
ID precision medicine research questions consider different factors than other fields, such as oncology, that are typically associated with personalized care. Infectious diseases treatment often occurs in a time-pressured setting (e.g., initiating empiric therapy for pneumonia or sepsis). Infectious diseases often intersect with other specialties. Additionally, the field stands to benefit from the increased study of the microbiome – a current NIAID priority that can be realized through AoU – as well as continued human genome research. These considerations should be integrated into AoU research priorities at the program’s outset.
It is critical that IDSA, NIAID, and other stakeholders work together to emphasize the importance of ID precision medicine research as NIH prioritizes efforts in this area. AoU data can be harnessed to improve ID patient care, diagnostics, vaccines, pharmacogenomics, and drug development. Suggested research topics at the intersection of ID and precision medicine include:
• Using precision medicine to predict patients at risk for post-infectious complications of vector-borne illnesses;
• Identifying the metabolic features of patients who develop mild vs. severe manifestations of influenza;
• Improving precision management of acute infections and sepsis (as a major burden to healthcare systems);
• Using AoU data to track and test individual responses to population-level emerging infection interventions;
• The “other” genome: microbiota and the pathogenesis of infectious diseases;
• Using precision medicine to determine optimal antiretroviral therapy in aging people
living with HIV;
• Exploring precision vaccinology to determine who may benefit from particular vaccines,
doses, and/or formulations;
• Discovering microbial causes of illnesses previously not considered to be infectious
diseases.
As the AoU Research Program matures, the integration of electronic medical record (EMR)- generated and big data platforms will aid in the advancement of precision medicine. The NIAID Genomics Centers for Infectious Diseases (GCID) can leverage these advances to improve innovative applications of genomic ID technologies and more efficiently sequence microbial isolates, host microbiomes, and invertebrate vectors of infectious diseases. Likewise, the Clinical Genomics Program builds upon large-scale gene sequencing analysis to better understand, diagnose, and treat immune system disorders, and the program’s combined focus on genetics and immunology and multi-disciplinary approach align with the AoU research philosophy. NIAID should harness AoU program data to help researchers study the etiology of antimicrobial resistance, autoimmune disorders, host responses, and host-pathogen interactions.
PAGE 3—IDSA Comments to NIAID RE NIH All of Us Research Priorities
IDSA will continue to emphasize the importance of infectious diseases precision medicine research as AoU shifts its focus from data collection to research considerations. We applaud NIAID’s work in this area to date and recommend that the Institute join IDSA in championing critical ID research questions as NIH prioritizes its efforts in this area. We look forward to continued dialogue as this important issue evolves and appreciate your consideration.
Sincerely,
Paul G. Auwaerter, MD, MBA, FIDSA President, IDS
🙏🏽 Lord, hear our prayer.
I mean, it’s important someone important falls on their sword for this one.
As I see it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is still in business churning out chimera, and we’re still funding it. + the FOIA thing.
So, we’ve learned NOTHING; the lid to Pandora’s box is still wide open.
🦠