Emails show that Dr. David Morens communicated with Peter Daszak about a grant from the NIH to EcoHealth Alliance for research on bat coronaviruses.
Congress on April 16 subpoenaed a top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci who used his personal email to communicate in a bid to evade a federal transparency law.
The House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a subpoena to Dr. David Morens, who for years advised Dr. Fauci when they both worked for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Emails released this month confirm that Dr. Morens messaged Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit, multiple times using his personal email.
One of the emails was sent in 2022 after Dr. Morens told Mr. Daszak and others that he preferred to communicate via Google’s Gmail because his government email was “FOIA’d constantly.”
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lets people request government information, including emails from government officials.
“Just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times,” Dr. Morens wrote.
In a missive to a group that included Mr. Daszak, Dr. Morens said that he “retained very few emails or documents” on the origins of COVID-19 “and continued to request that correspondence on sensitive issues” be sent to his Gmail address.
A whistleblower sent images of headers of emails sent from Dr. Morens’s personal email to the subcommittee. Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee, released the images as he requested the emails from Dr. Gerald Keusch, a Boston University professor who was included in them.
EcoHealth then released the emails in full as it stated that it wanted to “show clearly that EcoHealth Alliance was appropriately communicating with senior staff at the NIH, or who formerly worked at NIH.”
The emails show that Dr. Morens communicated with Mr. Daszak across four different email chains about a grant from the NIH to EcoHealth for research on bat coronaviruses. EcoHealth funneled some of the funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory in China.
