House COVID origins panel accuses Fauci adviser of obstructing probe, subpoenas him for public testimony
A House committee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic accused the onetime top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci of obstructing their probe — and subpoenaed him a third time, now to force him to testify before his ex-boss.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued the subpoena to Dr. David Morens on Wednesday, demanding his appearance at a May 22 hearing.
Morens still serves as a senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci helmed from 1984 to 2022.
In a cover letter, subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) accused the NIAID senior adviser of “intentionally employing dilatory tactics in order to unreasonably stall” his scheduled testimony until after Fauci’s hearing, currently scheduled for June 3.
“This appears to be a poorly veiled attempt to protect Dr. Fauci, insulate him from the actions the Select Subcommittee is investigating, and obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation,” Wenstrup wrote in the letter.
“Accordingly, your actions have left us no choice but to compel your testimony.”
Emails obtained by the subcommittee, Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said, show the stalling tactics discussed by EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak, whose organization used federal grants to conduct risky gain-of-function research.
“Each day of delay helps. They’re trying to book David in for a public hearing between mine (May 1st) and Fauci’s (June 3rd),” Daszak wrote in an April 20 email released by the COVID panel. “David’s lawyers are trying to negotiate and delay his til after Tony.”
Morens’ counsel told subcommittee staff members two days after the email that his client was “unavailable” — and offered four other proposed dates for a hearing, three of which were when Congress was scheduled to be out of session.
The email begins with a word of thanks to Dr. Gerald Keusch, an associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute, who the subcommittee sought records from last month.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and well-known contributor on CNN broadcasts during the pandemic, was also included in the email chain.
The subcommittee has already issued two subpoenas for Morens’ email records after discovering that he used his private account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, potentially violating federal record-keeping laws.
He was placed on administrative leave by the NIH last year after Wenstrup drew attention to the alleged violations. In January, the subcommittee interviewed him and later expressed concerns about his testimony regarding the potential deletion of COVID origins records.
Morens communicated privately with Daszak to try to reinstate funding for an NIH grant to experiment on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located in the Chinese city where the COVID-19 pandemic began more than four years ago.
EcoHealth has received more than $4 million from the NIH for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” which had its funding cut off in April 2020 but was reinstated in May 2023.
None of the work is still being done in China, but $1.4 million in US taxpayers’ money flowed to the WIV between 2014 and 2021 for the research on SARS coronaviruses.
Emails released by EcoHealth last month in response to The Post’s request for comment showed that Morens “recklessly provided Dr. Daszak with access to non-public information and offered insight into internal conversations at NIAID,” according to the subcommittee.
In one of the emails, Morens confirms that Fauci was in “damage control” mode after EcoHealth’s NIH grant was suspended in 2020.
In a May 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci repeatedly denied that NIH grants had funded gain-of-function research at WIV.
Another email uncovered by the subcommittee also revealed Morens sharing “confidential” information from the NIH about how Fauci was preparing to respond to accusations that the Wuhan research lab used substandard biosafety levels.
Republicans and Democrats grilled Daszak at a hearing last week after having recommended the Justice Department criminally investigate him for having given potentially false testimony to the subcommittee — and debar EcoHealth from receiving any future federal grants.
Daszak and EcoHealth have repeatedly denied that the NIH-funded experiments in Wuhan involved gain-of-function research.
An EcoHealth spokesperson declined to comment. The Post has reached out to NIAID for comment.
