A former adviser to Anthony Fauci, who was the US president’s chief medical adviser from 2021 to 2022, has been indicted for his alleged role in a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act requests related to Covid-19 research grants.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) employee David M. Morens is charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.

He served as a senior adviser in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022.

Reactions to Morens’ indictment vary. There are those who see this as proof that the dominoes have started to fall and more indictments will follow while some think that Morens may be the fall guy for others higher up in the echelons.

The indictment has sparked fresh calls for the indictment of Fauci, who was director of NIAID from 1984 to 2022, and others in the US administration who are suspected of being involved in a Covid cover-up.

US acting attorney-general Todd Blanche said of Morens’ indictment: “These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most – during the height of a global pandemic.

“As alleged in the indictment, Dr Morens and his co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of Covid-19.

“Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest – not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said: “Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.

“Not only did Morens allegedly engage in the illegal obfuscation of his communications, but he received kickbacks for doing so. If you have engaged in activity conspiring against the United States, we will not stop until you face justice.”

David Morens

One of the incriminating emails sent by Morens (in February 2021) states: “You are right, I need to be more careful. However, as I mentioned once before, I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

The US Department of Justice said that, as a senior adviser, Morens counselled “Senior NIAID Official 1 and other senior-level NIAID staff” on senior-level policies, developed recommendations and solutions for issues impacting the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and wrote and edited manuscripts.

The unnamed ‘Senior NIAID Official 1’ is widely understood to be Anthony Fauci.

The justice department stated: “According to the indictment, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud and commit several offenses against the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant.

“NIH terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence (bat coronavirus grant), based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China. NIAID awarded the grant to Company #1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the WIV.”

‘Company 1’ refers to the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) and ‘Co-Conspirator 1’ is taken to refer to the EHA’s former director Peter Daszak.

On January 17, 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had debarred the EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak from participating in all US federal government procurement and non-procurement programmes for five years.

‘Co-Conspirator 2’ is being taken to refer to Gerald Keusch, a former associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute and an NIH grantee.

Molecular biologist Richard Ebright, who is a professor at Rutgers University and a member of the NGO Biosafety Now, tweeted in February 2025: “Keusch was Director of the NIH Fogarty International Center in 1989-2003. The first US-government funding to Shi Zhengli at Wujan Institute of Virology …, with Daszak as cutout and bagman, was authorized by Keusch in 2002 (NIH grant TW005869).”

The justice department states that, following the termination of the grant for ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence’, Morens and ‘Co-Conspirator 2’ pledged to help ‘Co-Conspirator 1’ restore the termination of the grant and counter the narrative that Covid-19 leaked from a lab.

“In anticipation that their communications would be requested through a FOIA Request, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, and Co-Conspirator 2 agreed in writing to intentionally hide from public view their communications by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account,” the justice department states.

“The indictment alleges that the conspirators used Morens’s personal Gmail account to exchange non-public NIH information; correspond about their efforts to influence NIH to fund Company #1; exchange edits to drafts of letters addressed to NIH leadership for Company #1 and Co-Conspirator 1; and ‘back-channel’ information to Senior NIAID Official 1.”

‘Illegal gratuities’

Additionally, the justice department states, “the indictment further alleges that Morens and Co-Conspirator 1 conspired to pay illegal gratuities”.

It adds: “The indictment states that Co-Conspirator 1 gifted Morens wine for his ‘behind-the-scenes shenanigans,’ and arranged for its delivery to Morens’s residence in Maryland.

“Morens then allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.”

The justice department adds that the indictment further alleges that ‘Co-Conspirator 1’ suggested that he would provide Morens with additional things of value, including meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C.

NIH grantees

The department notes that Morens gathered information from grantees and others in the scientific community about Covid-19.

“This enabled Morens to understand NIH and NIAID’s historical activities in coronavirus research, assist in formulating policy and procedures, and brief Senior NIAID Official 1 so he could then relay information to the President of the United States, Congress, and the public,” the department stated.

The grant for the project entitled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence”, led by Daszak, was awarded in 2014.

Thousands of bat samples were to be screened for novel coronaviruses and the research was also to involve screening people who work with live animals.

Daszak stated in the project proposal: “The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the ecology, evolutionary biology and transmission dynamics of bat coronaviruses at the human-wildlife interface.

“Specifically, we will conduct field studies in China to obtain high quality samples from bats, and identify, characterise and isolate known and novel coronaviruses. We will analyse the patterns of coronavirus transmission among bats and other wildlife, and the risk of spillover to humans.”

The grant provided the EcoHealth Alliance with nearly $3.1 million. It was initially awarded for a five-year period – from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019, but was then suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020.

Denials and contradictions

Senator Rand Paul, who has been in numerous head-to-head confrontations with Fauci in Congress, said in an interview with Fox News that during a congressional hearing before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on June 3, 2024, Fauci had thrown Morens “under the bus” and acted as if he’d hardly ever met him.

Morens had written in an email about a “secret back channel” that he said he would use to communicate with Fauci outside the public eye.

He stated in one email that he sent to Peter Daszak: “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work … He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Fauci said he knew nothing of Morens’ actions in assisting Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance “or his conducting NIH business on his personal e-mail account or deleting emails to avoid FOIAs”.

He said during the congressional hearing: “What you saw, I believe, with Dr Morens was an aberrancy and an outlier.”

Fauci denied purposely using his private email address for official business. He told the congressional hearing: “Let me state for the record that, to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email.”

At one stage in the hearing Fauci contradicted himself. He stated that Morens had acted inappropriately, but then said he didn’t know exactly what Morens was doing.

Rand Paul (left) and Anthony Fauci.

Fauci, Daszak, Folkers, Baric et al.

Richard Ebright tweeted on June 4, 2024: “Fauci has made it clear he will throw his stooges under the bus, even after they perjure themselves on his behalf. Morens should take note and cooperate. As should Fauci’s other stooges who perjured themselves on his behalf: Folkers, Auchincloss, Stemmy, Andersen, and Garry.”

The select subcommittee obtained evidence that Fauci’s former chief of staff, Greg Folkers, used FOIA-evading tactics by strategically misspelling words.

“This evasion tactic ensures that when the NIH searches its email server for key words that are responsive to a FOIA request, Mr Folkers’s emails that contain the misspelled key word are not identified or produced as a responsive document,” the select subcommittee chairman, Brad Wenstrup, said.

“In one email produced to the select subcommittee through a subpoena, Mr Folkers appears to have purposefully misspelled ‘EcoHealth’ as ‘Ec~Health’.”

Richard Ebright said that the evidence against Fauci, Morens, and Keusch was compelling. He said that, unless one or more of the men flipped and provided evidence against Fauci and others in exchange for immunity, all three should, and likely would be convicted.

Rand Paul tweeted: “Go after the Fauci pardon next”.

President Joe Biden issued a pre-emptive pardon to Fauci in January 2025.

This was a full and unconditional pardon “for any offenses against the United States” that Fauci may have committed or taken part in from January 1, 2014, to the date of the pardon, “arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President”.

The senior vice-president of advocacy and public policy at the non-profit watchdog group White Coat Waste, Justin Goodman, tweeted on April 29: “May 11 is the last day to charge Fauci for lying to @SenRandPaul in 2021 about funding gain-of-function in Wuhan. But @WhiteCoatWaste has evidence he also lied to @COVIDSelect in 2024, saying he never conducted NIH biz on personal email. He can still be charged until June 2029 (if his pardon is voided) because the statute of limitations lasts five years from the date of the offense (in this case, potential perjury).”

Emeritus professor André M. Goffinet from Belgium, who was a founding member of the DRASTIC group of scientists and other independent researchers, tweeted: “Dr. Morens should not become the scapegoat for all zoonati.

“Others like Fauci, Daszak, [Ralph] Baric and of course Zhengli Shi and her colleagues, bear a much higher responsibility than Dr Morens.”

Baric is in charge of coronavirus research at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill in the US.

Zhengli Shi (or Shi Zhengli) who became known as ‘Bat Woman’, is the director of the Centre for Infectious Diseases at the WIV.

Zoonati refers to those who say that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural zoonotic origin.

Indian scientist Monali C. Rahalkar, who was also a founding member of DRASTIC, said: “Morens was the easy target. He is not the real big culprit as such, but maybe this is just the start.

“The people who are responsible for the real Covid-origin cover-up are the ones who should go to jail. Fauci, Daszak, and Baric should also be indicted. Fauci and his colleagues tried to suppress the lab-leak hypothesis.

“There has, as yet, been no official investigation into the role of Ralph Baric, and the UNC has been trying to hide records of his work. At DRASTIC, we long suspected Baric’s culpability. We never thought that the ‘blaming-only-China’ narrative fitted.”

Rahalkar and her husband, fellow scientist Rahul A. Bahulikar, were the first people to write papers about the striking similarities between Covid-19 and the cases of a pneumonia-like illness that, in 2012, affected miners working in the Tongguan mineshaft in Mojiang, Yunnan.

Also noteworthy was “the fact that RaTG13/CoV4991, the next genomic relative of SARS-CoV-2, was found in the same mineshaft”, the authors state.

(Rahalkar and Bahulikar, have also written a book entitled ‘Where did the COVID-19 virus come from? The mystery-solving race’ . The book includes a deep dive into the role of Ralph Baric and the Wuhan and associated labs that might have been responsible for the lab leak.)

DRASTIC has always been at the forefront of research into the possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2.

The group was the first to publish details of EcoHealth Alliance’ DEFUSE project, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) refused to fund.

Bioengineer and immunologist Valentin Bruttel has described the project as “a precise blueprint for how SARS2 came into existence”.

Ralph Baric’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was listed as a partner in the DEFUSE proposal.

Rand Paul made the following comment in a tweet on April 30: “One question Ralph Baric has never answered satisfactorily is this: Why did he never inform pandemic leaders that his lab and Wuhan bat scientist Shi Zhengli had submitted a proposal to genetically engineer a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site two years before a pandemic caused by a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site erupted in Wuhan, China?”

If convicted, Morens faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for conspiracy against the United States, a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations, and a maximum penalty of three years in prison for each count of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records.

Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district judge determines sentencing after considering the US sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors.

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