Former Fauci aide charged with concealing Covid records

An ex-adviser to former top public US health official Anthony Fauci has been indicted by Trump administration prosecutors on accusations that he illicitly concealed federal records during the Covid pandemic.

The justice department on Tuesday announced charges against David Morens, 78, of Chester, Maryland, amid a sharply divisive debate over the origins of the coronavirus, which has become particularly politicized during Donald Trump’s two presidencies. Competing theories – including a natural spillover versus a potential lab leak – have fueled partisan clashes, with splits along ideological lines.

Morens served as a senior adviser in the office of the director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 2006 to 2022 (NIAID). Fauci had served as director of the NIAID from 1984 to 2022, spearheading the White House’s response to the pandemic during Donald Trump’s first presidency.

In addition to their criticism of Fauci and other scientists for being dismissive of the lab leak theory, Trump and his Republican allies criticized Fauci for urging Americans to take measures to protect them from spreading and contracting the potentially deadly virus, including wearing masks and getting vaccinated.

The Trump administration’s justice department alleged two co-conspirators in the indictment against Morens but stopped short of naming them.

An attorney for Morens, Timothy Belevetz, declined a request for comment.

According to the indictment, the NIAID awarded a research grant to a company and an unnamed co-conspirator, who then issued a sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) – under which the NIAID is housed – later terminated the grant, based on allegations that Covid may have emerged from the Wuhan lab.

After the grant’s termination, prosecutors alleged that Morens and others tried to help restore the funding and allegedly “counter the narrative that Covid-19 leaked from a lab”.

Morens and two co-conspirators – anticipating that their communications would be requested under the federal Freedom of Information Act – “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 alleged in a statement.