The indictment of David Morens, former senior scientific adviser to Anthony Fauci at the NIH, on charges of hiding records about COVID-19’s origins from the public through coordinated evasion of Freedom of Information Act requests, is part of a cover-up that investigative journalist Paul Thacker has been documenting since 2021. Thacker, a former fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and former Senate investigator into corruption in science and medicine, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain what the indictment reveals, where the investigation could lead, and what the still-classified intelligence about COVID’s origins appears to show.
Thacker said the cover-up he identified and published in the British Medical Journal in 2021 was not primarily about concealing certainty that the virus came from a Wuhan lab, but about concealing the strong suspicions that it did and preventing scrutiny of the NIH funding that flowed through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance to Chinese Communist Party-backed researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He said within weeks of his BMJ article appearing, emails he later obtained showed that Morens, Daszak, and a third figure named Gerald Keusch, now professor emeritus of virology at Boston University, began plotting against him, contacting his editor at the BMJ to undermine his reporting. Keusch, he said, appears as co-conspirator two in the Morens indictment, with Daszak as co-conspirator one.
Thacker said that when he watched Fauci wag his finger at Senator Rand Paul during a Senate hearing and deny under oath that NIH funded gain of function research with novel coronaviruses, he recognized it immediately as a lie. He called someone in Washington from Madrid the same day and said he had just watched Fauci lie under oath. He said the distinction he has always maintained is that we know from emails that the cover-up happened, but we do not yet know with certainty whether they were covering up knowledge that the virus came from a lab or merely covering up the embarrassing trail of funding that connected Fauci’s institute to the research. He said Rand Paul released emails showing Fauci told colleagues to delete emails, and that a February 2020 email Fauci sent to a top lieutenant referencing a 2015 gain of function study he co-funded with Beric and Shi Zhengli, which he labeled in the email subject line as a SARS gain of function study, then flatly denied constituted gain of function research when questioned about it under oath the following year.
Fauci has a preemptive pardon from President Biden covering the period from 2014 through the end of the Biden term, which insulates him from federal prosecution including perjury charges. Thacker said the most realistic avenue for at least getting the record established is for Attorney General Todd Blanch to indict Fauci anyway, walk through all the charges publicly, and then allow Fauci to invoke his pardon, creating a formal legal record of the alleged conduct even if punishment cannot follow. He also noted that Rand Paul has sent letters requesting a deposition of Fauci, and that if Fauci were to lie in that deposition about his prior lies, that would constitute a new charge not covered by the existing pardon. Potential loss of his federal pension represents an additional financial consequence that exists independent of criminal liability.
He walked through the significance of Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina virologist who has been placed on leave by UNC and had his NIH grants suspended, a development Thacker said he discovered only when he called an inside source at Tony Fauci’s former institute while working on a story for Real Clear Investigations. A classified briefing source he spoke to summarized the relationship between Baric and the Wuhan researchers with the formulation that Baric designed the gun, the Chinese built it, and then they pulled the trigger. Thacker said he does not believe Baric physically constructed the virus in his own lab but that he taught the Wuhan researchers the techniques, including how to create chimeric viruses with furin cleavage sites that make them uniquely adapted to infect human cells, which is exactly what the 2018 DARPA grant proposal submitted by Daszak and colleagues, including Baric and Shi Zhengli, described proposing to do. DARPA rejected the grant. A virus matching that description appeared in Wuhan the following year.
Baric gave a classified briefing to the intelligence community in late January or early February 2020 that, according to a slide deck released by Rand Paul, discussed the possibility that the pandemic originated at a Wuhan lab. A month later he briefed congressional staff and made no mention of that possibility, no mention of the furin cleavage site, and nothing about the research history that would explain a lab origin. Thacker said as a former Senate investigator familiar with the thousand-and-one statute prohibiting lying or misleading Congress, he is uncertain whether that particular briefing format qualifies as an official congressional proceeding, which would determine whether the omissions rise to criminal exposure.
He said multiple people with top-secret clearances who received classified intelligence briefings have told him there is material in those briefings that was not declassified despite a law passed under Biden requiring the intelligence community to declassify COVID origins information, and that everything in the classified material that remains secret points in the same direction, that the virus came from the Wuhan lab. He closed by noting that an NIH scientist is currently under FBI investigation for transporting monkeypox virus from Congo with apparent intent to bring it to his lab in Montana, a detail he said illustrates that the fundamental problem of unsupervised and undisclosed dangerous pathogen research has not been resolved despite everything the COVID episode revealed.