A whistleblower shared more COVID origins emails that an adviser to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci allegedly concealed on a private account, a House panel revealed on Thursday.
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup disclosed the further apparent violations of federal record-keeping laws by NIAID senior scientific adviser Dr. David Morens in a letter to one of its recipients.
“The Select Subcommittee is now aware of potential further attempts by Dr. Morens to subvert public transparency,” Wenstrup (R-Ohio) wrote in a letter to Dr. Gerald Keusch, an associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute.
“It is unclear the extent of your communication with Dr. Morens, or others within the Federal government,” he added, before including four emails the NIAID senior adviser sent to Keusch and EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.
One of the emails sent on July 17, 2020, includes in its subject line “China, SARS-CoV2 origin, animal reservoir, WHO mission,” in reference to the World Health Organization, which was handling the global response to the pandemic.
Three other emails listed the number of a National Institutes of Health grant made to the Manhattan-based EcoHealth for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” which initiated in 2014 and was renewed in 2019.
“2R01AI110964 was the NIH grant that Fauci lied about in three US Senate hearings in which he claimed — knowingly, willfully, and brazenly untruthfully — that the NIH had not funded virus gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research on SARS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan,” Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, told The Post when asked about the grant number listed.
Moren’s April 26, 2020, email included in the whistleblower disclosures, he added, came two days after the NIH suspended EcoHealth’s grant after having “improperly” renewed the funding without a “secretary-level, risk-benefit review” by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is mandated by federal policy.
That proposal for a renewed grant “set forth plans to construct more such novel chimeric viruses, targeting viruses having even higher affinities for human receptors and higher pandemic potential,” Ebright pointed out.
“The grant in question was suspended by NIH after an arbitrary decision by then-President Trump to cancel the grant,” an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said in a statement. “Dr. Daszak was naturally concerned about this unexpected and unjustified political interference in EcoHealth Alliance’s approved NIH funding.”
“These emails show that Dr. Daszak had been seeking advice on how to deal with this unprecedented situation from Dr. Morens,” the spokesperson added, sharing a press release with the full emails made available to the public.
“NIH did reinstate the grant in May 2023, with EcoHealth Alliance proposing a renegotiated work plan that removed any on-the-ground activities in China.”
The NIH made subawards through its grant to EcoHealth of more than half a million dollars for research at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Government Accountability Office report found last year, the city where many US government officials and lawmakers now believe the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak due to gain-of-function experiments.
NIH suspended that grant in 2020, and the agency’s principal deputy director Lawrence A. Tabak acknowledged in an Oct. 20, 2021, letter to Congress that Wuhan researchers tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor” in mice.
Those mice “became sicker” when infected with the modified virus than those infected with the unmodified virus, Tabak said, and EcoHealth had “failed to report” having created novel coronaviruses that exceeded “a one log increase in growth.”
However, Tabak denied that the grant produced COVID-19, since the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant,” but another proposal from EcoHealth has since been cited by scientific experts as “smoking gun” evidence that SARS-CoV-2 came from a Wuhan research lab.
The final email shared by Wenstrup in his Thursday letter was allegedly sent in February 2022 and has the subject line “emails from Erik Stemmy to say he’s unable to talk with me anymore about our suspended R01,” an apparent reference to the NIH grant to EcoHealth.
NIH terminated the grant in August 2022, informing EcoHealth Alliance in a letter that it had not complied with the terms and conditions attached to the funding, while allowing for a potential renegotiation of the award in the future.
But EcoHealth is still receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and subawards from the US government for research on “pathogens of pandemic potential” abroad.
In 2023, however, the Department of Health and Human Services banned the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving US government funding for the next 10 years.
The House COVID Subcommittee last year unearthed other emails from Morens in which he claimed to “always communicate on gmail [sic] because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly” and to “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
Another email called out his boss — who famously denied to Congress that the US ever funded gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan — for being skittish about COVID origins questions.
“Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” Morens said in a July 2021 email.
Wenstrup’s letter has asked Keusch to hand over all communications and documents related to Morens, NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and COVID-19’s origins by April 25.
The Post has reached out to Keusch and EcoHealth for comment.
