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.
What Fauci did not say was that the study’s lead author, computational biologist Kristian Andersen, had an $8.9 million grant pending with NIH when the paper was submitted, or that Fauci had personally initiated the scientists’ examination of the origins question. Nor did Fauci tell reporters that in a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with a dozen scientists who studied the virus, a vast majority (10 of the 12) believed it was possible the virus had come from a lab.
Indeed, emails would later show that Andersen — the lead author of the paper — harbored strong suspicions that COVID-19 had emerged from a lab, not a wet market.
“Accidental escape [from a lab] is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory,” Andersen wrote to colleagues on Slack.
“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened,” Andersen wrote in another message to colleagues.
Today, most U.S. agencies, including the CIA, agree with Andersen that COVID-19 probably came from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Yet for years, the public was given a starkly different story: COVID-19 came from a wet market. People who suggested otherwise were not just wrong; they were peddling a racist conspiracy theory.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, in February 2020.
Daszak, like certain high-ranking public health officials, had reason to push a wet market origin theory. EcoHealth Alliance had received millions of dollars from the federal government, some for grants to study gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
All of this helps explain why natural origin became the “official story” of the public health bureaucracy, which enlisted its army of court intellectuals to advance its narrative and punish dissenters.
Under government pressure, Facebook began to treat claims that COVID-19 could have been “man-made or manufactured” as misinformation. Many were censored, and scientists who challenged the government’s narrative were attacked by a compliant media and accused of spreading “misinformation.”
In truth, it was the media that had fallen victim to a misinformation campaign. One led by a cabal of scientists intent on suppressing scientific inquiry and free speech. And we’re likely to get a fuller picture of the conspiracy soon.
Morens, who had previously indicated he was “pretty sure” his boss was also deleting emails, is scheduled to be sentenced in November. The Justice Department should spend the next several months making it clear that its sentence recommendation hinges on something that was mightily abused during the COVID-19 era: the truth.
FORMER FAUCI AID PLEADS GUILTY TO COVID-19 CONSPIRACY
COVID-19 killed millions of people, but the truth arguably received even worse treatment. Panic, politics, and propaganda created an environment of dogma, lies, and censorship — eerily similar to that found in authoritarian systems. It called to mind F.A. Hayek’s observation that unbridled state power is not just a threat to freedom but truth itself.
Fortunately, the truth finally has its pants on. Buckle up.