This week brought more bad news for scientists connected to a nonprofit U.S. research organization, the EcoHealth Alliance, some of whose critics allege it helped spark the COVID-19 pandemic with risky virus studies. A congressional panel yesterday grilled a top scientific adviser to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci about email exchanges the witness had with his longtime friend Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s embattled president. Both Democrats and Republicans on the panel suggested the adviser tried to evade public records laws and offered inappropriate help to the EcoHealth leader.
In a separate action, federal officials informed Daszak they want to bar him personally—not just his organization—from receiving federal funding.
The hearing yesterday was the latest in a series held by the House of Representatives’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Under fire was David Morens, an infectious disease expert who advised Fauci for 24 years. Morens is now on administrative leave after it became public that he used personal email accounts to correspond with Daszak, as well as other researchers, about the 2020 suspension of a controversial NIAID grant to EcoHealth and its subsequent reinstatement.
That $3.1 million grant included a $600,000 subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for bat virus experiments that Republicans on the subcommittee claim created SARS-CoV-2 despite an absence of direct evidence. The grant was initially killed, after then-President Donald Trump publicly said it should be cut, and then reinstated but suspended by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Last year, NIH restored a new version of the grant that did not include WIV.
The panel had previously grilled Daszak and obtained some of his emails in which Morens urged him to use Morens’s personal email rather than his NIAID email account. Yesterday, it focused on some 30,000 pages of Morens's emails from those personal accounts that it had subpoenaed. The emails “raise serious questions regarding potential wrongdoing and illegal activity,” according to a 35-page memo from the panel’s staff. Morens’s own words in the emails suggested he had: worked with NIAID’s Freedom of Information Act office to avoid having his work emails released to the public, deleted emails to avoid FOIA, and helped Daszak’s efforts to restore his grant by editing EcoHealth documents. The report also faulted Morens for making sexist remarks about President Joe Biden’s selection of a woman, Rochelle Walensky, to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and for making profane sexual comments about women in a different email.
During a nearly 2-hour hearing, subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup (R–OH) said Morens “purposefully evaded public transparency required” by FOIA and that he was “not truthful” in a previous interview with the panel. Republicans and Democrats hammered him for behavior they called “deeply troubling,” “very disturbing,” and “disgusting,” and said it betrayed his fellow federal workers. Only Republicans argued the emails are evidence of efforts by Morens and others at NIAID to hide the agency’s involvement in funding potentially risky virus research.
In his testimony, Morens repeatedly apologized for his actions and said “jokes” between friends were being misinterpreted as actual misdeeds. He said he switched to a personal Gmail account to correspond with Daszak because Daszak and his family were receiving death threats. He worried that personal information in NIH emails could be publicly released, after being requested via FOIA, and increase the risks for Daszak. He dismissed a comment he made about wanting a “kickback” from EcoHealth’s reinstated grant, as well as a reference to creating a “secret back channel” to Fauci, as “black humor” among friends trying to lift Daszak’s spirits. But he also expressed remorse for “embarrassing” and “misogynistic” remarks about women and said he is “very ashamed.”
The committee’s memo also suggests Morens improperly used his personal email to share internal NIAID documents with Fauci through the NIAID chief’s own personal email, and that was part of a “conspiracy” to hide agency records on COVID-19’s origins. Morens said any official NIAID business conducted via his personal email was not intentional and resulted from both email accounts sharing one app on his phone.
Lawmakers were unpersuaded—although one noted Morens was not alone in using personal email for official matters. “Who is your FOIA lady? Is it Hillary Clinton?” said Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–GA), alluding to the controversy sparked by Clinton’s use of a nongovernment email server when she was secretary of state. And Debbie Dingell (D–MI), although also troubled by the “disdain” for FOIA in Morens’s emails, suggested that “this investigation has really been about trying to … pin the blame on NIH and NIAID for the COVID-19 pandemic.” Democrats on the panel have said the panel has found no evidence that EcoHealth’s work played a role in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
The hearing took place shortly after it became publicly known that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had informed Daszak it had suspended his own ability to receive federal funding and intended to formally debar, or ban, him from receiving future funding. HHS had already taken similar action against EcoHealth, alleging it had violated NIH rules in managing the controversial grant, for example by filing a late grant progress report. In a 21 May letter to Daszak, HHS wrote that the action was warranted because, “The improper conduct of EHA [EcoHealth Alliance] is imputed to you” and was “necessary to protect the public interest.”
Prominent outside researchers and scientific societies vocally defended EcoHealth and Daszak when NIH initially cut the group’s grant. But many early defenders of EcoHealth have become more muted. Still, some argue the HHS punishments exceed the transgressions. The sanctioning of Daszak “is a concerning development, and effectively stops a respected researcher from doing the science we all need to keep us safe from zoonotic pathogens,” says Georgetown University global law expert Lawrence Gostin. He says debarment typically requires “clear evidence of unethical or unlawful behavior done with knowledge and intention,” and he hasn’t seen such evidence.
Gerald Keusch of Boston University, former director of NIH’s Fogarty International Center and a friend of Daszak’s who is included on many of the emails obtained by the subcommittee, says: “This escalation is really dangerous to science, for scientists, and for national security.”
In a statement, EcoHealth said Daszak and his organization plan to submit evidence to challenge the proposed organizational and personal debarments, which “are based on false assumptions and misrepresentations and misunderstandings of the science involved, and selective use of the evidentiary record.” Wenstrup’s panel plans to question Fauci at a hearing on 3 June, and to complete its investigation in the next 7 months.
