During a recent Congressional hearing, we learned that David Morens prided himself on his ability to avoid transparency and purposefully evade FOIA. The hearing revealed emails in which Morens boasted that he “learned from our [FOIA] lady here how to make most emails disappear” and “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.”
But in a recent FOIA production obtained by ICAN’s attorneys, we discovered that Morens failed to delete at least one smoking gun. In an April 2020 email to Greg Folkers, Fauci’s Chief of Staff, Morens made an astonishing admission about CDC’s long-term incompetence in handling data and NIH’s willingness to cover it up:
Greg, please keep this confidential but you should know that for over a decade the flu folks at CDC have shockingly messed up their tabulations of flu mortality. We discovered 5-10 years ago that various web page and published data were totally inconsistent and could only be explained by major uncaught errors[.]
… apparently various folks in [t]he flu division made and put up and published mutually-inconsistent figures based on differing subjective assumptions[.]
Several years ago, maybe 4-5, we reached out to the top flu people at CDC informing them that their own data were problematic, that as a sister agency we did NOT want to draw attention to it but work with them privately to fix and reconcile the problems. At first they were grateful, and set up a mechani[sm] to work with us, but then when they discovered the depths of their own mistakes … they did the usual CDC thing and circled the wagons, refused to return calls and emails, etc. [W]e didn’t pursue things but were left unsettled.
To repeat, this was at the level of cdc’s flu leadership. I think we have to accept that they have serious issues and have not fixed them.
Let’s not forget that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we were told to “trust the experts,” many of whom worked for CDC. Recommendations and edicts handed down from on high at CDC were treated as gospel. The few brave souls who had the courage to publicly question CDC’s judgment were met with derision, pejoratives, censorship, and attacks on their careers and reputations. This makes it all the more infuriating to learn that, according to Morens, the “usual CDC thing” to do when its mistakes are discovered is to ignore the problem and refuse to discuss it—even when the mistake is discovered by another government agency!
Hellbound and Down 