A whistleblower shared more COVID origins emails that an adviser to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci allegedly concealed on a private account, a House panel revealed on Thursday.
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup disclosed the further apparent violations of federal record-keeping laws by NIAID senior scientific adviser Dr. David Morens in a letter to one of its recipients.
“The Select Subcommittee is now aware of potential further attempts by Dr. Morens to subvert public transparency,” Wenstrup (R-Ohio) wrote in a letter to Dr. Gerald Keusch, an associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute.
“It is unclear the extent of your communication with Dr. Morens, or others within the Federal government,” he added, before including four emails the NIAID senior adviser sent to Keusch and EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.
One of the emails sent on July 17, 2020, includes in its subject line “China, SARS-CoV2 origin, animal reservoir, WHO mission,” in reference to the World Health Organization, which was handling the global response to the pandemic.
Three other emails listed the number of a National Institutes of Health grant made to the Manhattan-based EcoHealth for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” which initiated in 2014 and was renewed in 2019.
“2R01AI110964 was the NIH grant that Fauci lied about in three US Senate hearings in which he claimed — knowingly, willfully, and brazenly untruthfully — that the NIH had not funded virus gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research on SARS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan,” Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, told The Post when asked about the grant number listed.
Moren’s April 26, 2020, email included in the whistleblower disclosures, he added, came two days after the NIH suspended EcoHealth’s grant after having “improperly” renewed the funding without a “secretary-level, risk-benefit review” by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is mandated by federal policy.
That proposal for a renewed grant “set forth plans to construct more such novel chimeric viruses, targeting viruses having even higher affinities for human receptors and higher pandemic potential,” Ebright pointed out.
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