Dr. Anthony Fauci helped lead the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the most influential U.S. officials during the COVID-19 pandemic is testifying to Congress on June 3, days after one of his former advisers admitted deleting emails.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, 83, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to late 2022, is sitting down in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in Washington to answer questions.
Members plan to ask Dr. Fauci about the growing scandal at his former agency, which centers on attempts to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that establishes the right of the public to obtain government information such as emails.
Unearthed missives show Dr. David Morens, the longtime senior adviser to the NIAID director, bragging in multiple emails about learning “how to make emails disappear” after FOIA requests are filed and that his Gmail was “now safe from FOIA.”
In another email obtained by the subcommittee, Dr. Morens wrote, “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”
Dr. Morens also said that Dr. Fauci employed a private email address.
“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house,“ he wrote on April 21, 2021. ”He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.” He also wrote separately that he had a “secret back channel” to Dr. Fauci.
Under oath, Dr. Morens told the subcommittee that was one of the jokes he made. He also claimed not to recall if he ever sent any messages to Dr. Fauci’s personal email account.
“I don’t remember if I did,” Dr. Morens said. “I may have, but I certainly told him some things that he asked me to tell him about the situation with Peter.”
Many of the emails were sent to Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance organization, which funneled money from the NIAID to a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Some of the money funded experiments that made a bat coronavirus more dangerous.
President Joe Biden’s administration has suspended funding to the lab, EcoHealth, and Mr. Daszak over their failure to produce records on the experiments.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee, asked Dr. Fauci on May 29 for all documents and communications from his personal email and cellphone related to the lab and related subjects.
Dr. Fauci said in a prepared opening statement that he knew nothing about Dr. Morens deleting emails or assisting Mr. Daszak.
He said that “despite his title, Dr. Morens was not an adviser to me on institute policy or other substantive issues.” Dr. Fauci also said that he’s “never conducted official business via my personal email.”
‘Anders$n’
In other emails obtained by the subcommittee, another top aide to Dr. Fauci used strange letter substitutions.
In one missive about Kristian Andersen, an outside scientist, Dr. Fauci’s aide Greg Folkers wrote “anders$n.” In a missive about EcoHealth, he wrote “Ec~Health.”
“This evasion tactic ensures that when the NIH searches its email server for keywords that are responsive to a FOIA request, Mr. Folkers’s emails that contain the misspelled keyword are not identified or produced as a responsive document,” Mr. Wenstrup said.
Searches in response to FOIA requests are typically based on keywords.
Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Morens, and other top officials in the National Institutes of Health, the parent agency of NIAID, advocated for the theory that COVID-19 came from nature, as opposed to the Wuhan lab.
Mr. Andersen is among the outside scientists who favor the theory. He co-wrote a paper that claimed COVID-19 definitely has a natural origin. The paper was “prompted” by Dr. Fauci, according to one of Mr. Andersen’s emails that was obtained by the subcommittee.
Mr. Andersen and other co-authors received millions of dollars in new funding from NIAID after the paper was published, records show.
Mr. Folkers has not responded to a request for comment.
Dr. Fauci said in his opening statement that accusations that he bribed Mr. Andersen and others with grant money are “preposterous.”
Other Questions
Dr. Fauci will also face questions about the testimony he delivered to the subcommittee behind closed doors in January.
According to a transcript disclosed on May 31, Dr. Fauci said he signed off on thousands of grants without reading any of them.
He also maintained that the Wuhan lab did not perform any gain-of-function experiments, or experiments to enhance a virus, despite two other government officials recently telling the subcommittee the testing did meet the definition of gain-of-function.
Dr. Fauci also said he did not know of any studies to support the 6-foot social distancing measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a member of the subcommittee, noted on social media platform X.
The social distancing “just sort of appeared,” Dr. Fauci said.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), another member of the subcommittee, added, “From arbitrary mandates, to suppressing the origins of COVID, to signing off on funds that ended up in a Communist China lab & horrific experiments on innocent animals, we have lots of questions to ask Dr. Fauci on Monday.”
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), though, signaled that Democrats may still hold the position that criticism of Dr. Fauci amounts to attacks against him.
“House Republicans will spend tomorrow’s hearing attacking science, vaccines, and Dr. Fauci,” he wrote on Sunday. “But those of us on the committee are prepared to push back on their lies. Health, science and truth, matters.”