NIH Avoided Transparency to Hide COVID Origins
Arrogant bureaucrats think they know better than us and vigorously avoid being held accountable.
One of the great things about our job at The Patriot Post is that we’re not here to generate click-bait or gin up outrage over everything. When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, that’s a good thing because that was so, like, four years ago, and it’s hard to stay mad that long or even just to keep caring.
Yet we are here to analyze the news, and sometimes the news is outrageous revelations about things that happened four years ago (okay, three years ago, but stick with me).
Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, we’ve learned that a top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tried to help cover up the origins of COVID by using a personal email address and deleting records on his official account.
Hillary Clinton, call your office.
Dr. David Morens didn’t use BleachBit to delete his emails or wipe his server “with a cloth or something,” but he did make a confession via a revealed email. “[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in an email dated February 24, 2021. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”
He wasn’t done. On April 21, 2021, he said, “There is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
The NIH Office of the General Counsel, on May 28, 2021, told the NIH FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV.” WIV is the abbreviation for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where COVID was almost certainly born and released, partly with gain-of-function research that received funding from NIH via EcoHealth Alliance.
Morens called people who believed there was a lab leak “nutters.”
On June 16, 2021, 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.”
Morens admonished colleagues in an email dated November 18, 2021, “I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail [sic].”
There are other email revelations, but you get the idea. Morens, Fauci, and the rest didn’t want the public to learn the truth about COVID’s origins — or especially their role in funding it.
“The information contained in these 30,000 pages of emails are deeply concerning,” said Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), “and in my opinion, reflects poorly upon Dr. Morens and the Office of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease under Dr. Fauci’s leadership and the NIH under Dr. Francis Collins.” He added, “Dr. Fauci’s NIAID was unfortunately less pristine than so many, including the media, would have had us all believe.”
That’s putting it mildly.
Rather than belabor any points, I’ll make a few simple observations about Morens and his emails.
The official death toll of COVID in the U.S. was over 1.2 million. Make of that number what you will, but don’t forget to add all of the excess deaths for other reasons — suicide, overdoses, etc. There was also the vast economic, educational, and political damage done by lockdowns and mandates with little or no scientific justification, as both Collins and Fauci have admitted. The Morens emails add to the stack of evidence that the nation’s highest public health officials — the ones we were supposed to trust for guidance and leadership — were more concerned with hiding things and deceiving the public to protect their own careers than they were with public health or the hijacked careers and lives of millions.
Bureaucratic malfeasance is the baseline, the norm, and it has been since the academic-minded Woodrow Wilson arrogantly worked to change our Republic into an administrative state ruled by highly educated “experts.” Today’s Democrats demand that we commoners submit to the wisdom of these career bureaucrats, who run amok with their power only to then cover up their damaging actions and behavior.
They get away with it, too. The Clintons made standard among Democrats the practice of dragging out allegations for a long time and then deriding any revelations as “old news.” The Morens emails were three whole years ago, they might say, implying no one cares anymore.
To that last point, Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) said, “What we’ve found is basically a cover-up of immense proportions where people were avoiding FOIA inquiries. There’s gonna be hell to pay when we actually get to the bottom of this, and I think we’re getting close.”
You gotta love his sentiment, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
