On Wednesday, David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal federal records related to the COVID-19 pandemic. He faces up to five years in prison.“By pleading guilty today,” his attorney Tim Belevetz said, “Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.”The guilty plea puts to rest the notion that public health officials did not conspire to hide truths (and emails) related to COVID-19.
“…there was no conspiracy theory,” Matt Ridley said in response to Morens’ guilty plea. “There was a conspiracy.”
That Morens had broken federal laws in an effort to conceal records is not exactly a revelation. In 2024, while testifying before the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, lawmakers read to Morens his own emails, which revealed him brazenly discussing how to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests by deleting files. “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear,” Morens wrote in one email.“The best way to avoid FOIA hassles is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive,” he wrote in another.The “sensitive” subject Morens was dealing with at the time was growing public skepticism of the government’s COVID-19 origin story.In 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIAID and Morens’s boss, testified under oath that the National Institutes of Health had not funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In April of the same year, Fauci told reporters that scientists, in a recently published paper (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”), had said it was not “plausible” that the virus could have emerged from a laboratory.
