NIAID’s David Morens Pleads Guilty to Concealing Records of Coronavirus Gain-of-Function Research Grant

Like Al Capone going to jail for income tax evasion.

The U.S. Department of Justice just announced in a press release that Former Senior NIAID Official Pleads Guilty to Charges Connected to Concealing Federal Records During COVID-19 Pandemic.

David M. Morens served as a Senior Advisor to the Director (specifically in NIAID’s Office of the Director) from 2006 through 2022, and was also a long-time senior advisor to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The charges pertain to the notorious NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence that funded Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric et al. to perform their gain-of-function research on SARS bat coronaviruses with their colleague Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The gist of the federal criminal charge to which Morens pleaded guilty is, according to the press release:

Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant. NIH terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, 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.

Following the termination, Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. In anticipation that their communications would be requested through FOIA Requests, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, and Co-Conspirator 2 agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.

The co-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. According to court documents, each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems.

I perceive this criminal charge and guilty plea for conspiracy to defraud the US government as akin to Al Capone being convicted for income tax evasion. The real issue here is not the concealment of public records and communications, but the illegal creation and subsequent illegal concealment of a bio-weapon in a Chinese biosecurity lab that resulted in incalculable death and damage to all of humanity.

Though Morens will likely serve time behind bars, his guilty plea and his punishment for this particular act of fraud strike me as a distraction from the elephant in the room.

Morens was one of Fauci’s top advisors, and I find it highly conspicuous that he took such a keen personal interest in Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, which was reviewed by the NIH in January 2014—the beginning of the period covered by Dr. Fauci’s preemptive pardon, as I documented in my post President Biden’s Preemptive Pardon of Fauci.