As I understand it, using a personal email to conduct government business is not exactly kosher.

Doing it to avoid accountability is definitely forbidden. Telling others to hide their correspondence on government business is Hillary Clinton-level malfeasance.

That, my friends, is exactly what the Senior Advisor to Anthony Fauci did during the COVID pandemic. As you would expect, our “public servants” at the National Institute for Allergies and Infection Diseases want to make sure that we normies don’t have access to anything they don’t decide to tell us.

This bombshell comes via The Intercept. Apparently, Mr. Morens wanted to make sure that any discussion regarding the origins of COVID was kept strictly off the record, never to be seen by the eyes of the public.

Breaking: In a 2021 exchange with leading scientists about Covid origins, a long-time NIH adviser to Dr. Fauci admitted to using a personal email address in an apparent effort to evade FOIA. He also expressed his intent to delete emails. My latest: https://t.co/EJ62RYYuuL

— Jimmy Tobias (@JamesCTobias) June 29, 2023

Now I can easily understand why it would be annoying as hell to have your email FOIA’d constantly, although I would have to assume that Mr. Morens himself would not have to comb through his Inbox to suss out what would be needed to be done to comply with requests. This is what you have peons for, right?

And there is a reason why FOIA exists–the public actually has a right to know what its employees are doing, at least short of disclosing information that harms national security, and such information is naturally redacted. So honestly, there is no excuse for intentionally evading the rules that apply to government documents. And no legal justification for it.

A TOP ADVISER to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny.

“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”

After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

FOIA, though, exists because in fact we the public have the right to see it in the New York Times, regardless of what some bureaucrat, no matter how up the chain of command, wants to happen.

What, exactly, is he trying to hide? After all, Fauci and the CDC have claimed from the beginning that COVID originated in a natural reservoir, and hence discussions about the origins would only be technical regarding exactly what that reservoir is and where it might be found–since nobody knows these things to this day, although they keep trying to gaslight us about it. It is not Racoon Dogs or something similar. If it were, they would go out and find a live Racoon Dog with the virus.

This hasn’t happened, and sorry folks, finding COVID fragments near Racoon Dog DNA isn’t evidence. You can find COVID residue pretty much anywhere around people infected with the virus.

Included is Peter Daszeck, one of the villains of the COVID pandemic, and in my own judgment the man most responsible for COVID escaping from the Wuhan laboratory. I personally believe that COVID was engineered in the manner described by Daszek in a grant application to DARPA and somehow escaped from the Wuhan lab, likely accidentally. I base this upon the preponderance of the evidence but concede that there is reasonable doubt.

The email that contains Morens’s statements was part of a broader exchange in which Morens and his scientist correspondents denounced media coverage by The Intercept and other publications concerning the origins of Covid and harshly criticized those who take seriously the possibility that the virus emerged from a research accident in Wuhan, China. They also laid out their own arguments in favor of a natural origin for the virus.

“The lab leakers are already stirring up bullshit lines of attack that will bring more negative publicity our way — which is what this is about — a way to line up the [gain-of-function] attack on Fauci, or the ‘risky research’ attack on all of us,” wrote Daszak in one email on September 7.

I have never understood the argument for gain-of-function research. The primary benefit claimed is that it enables the development of vaccines for diseases that may enter the human population, but such a vaccine has never been developed as a result of such research. More dangerous pathogens have been, routinely, but as far as I know, the only benefit of such research is satisfying the Dr. Strangelove-like fascination that these researchers have with apocalyptic dangers.

That view, by the way, is held by vast numbers of biological researchers, who see no benefit and great risks from gain-of-function research. And as we now know, this research was being done in collaboration with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, who are not partners you want to have.

In a separate email, Morens slammed scientists such as Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, calling them “harmful demagogues.” He also lamented the media’s platforming of such figures.

“They need to be called out. Because I am in government I can only fo [sic] this off the record, but I have done do [sic] again and again,” he wrote. “Some of them are knowingly promoting false equivalences [sic]. If they interviewed a Holocaust survivor, they would say they have to give equal time and space to a Nazi murderer. They have no shame.”

Government scientists have a disturbing tendency to slander people who disagree with them. The top guys at the NIH, CDC, and NIAID slandered the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration as “fringe epidemiologists” despite being Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford faculty members.

Whatever else you can say about them, those are not “fringe” credentials. I am not in the habit of accepting ad hominem arguments, either for or against a proposition, but calling these people “fringe” is like calling Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein “fringe” physicists. Their ideas should stand or fall on their own, but they are not ignoramuses.

But slander and hiding from the public are the best tools these officials had. Whether the virus came from a lab leak or escaped from the wild, the lab leak hypothesis and the potential role of gain-of-function research in its evolution are not crazy ideas, but viable hypotheses both taken seriously by serious people. Even Fauci, now that he is out of government, concedes that the virus might have escaped from the lab, but is itself “natural” and not engineered.

That is his new definition of “natural origin.”

Of course, during the pandemic Fauci and company worked hard to dismiss the lab leak theory, and Morens was heavily involved in the effort because Fauci “didn’t want his fingerprints” on the effort.

Dr. Fauci, in an attempt to conceal his involvement, asked Dr. Morens to publicly suppress the lab leak theory:

▪️ "…my boss Tony actually ASKED me to speak to the National Geographic on the record about origins"

▪️ "…Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories." pic.twitter.com/mljc84KJue

— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) June 29, 2023

Indeed, DARPA did a deep dive into the evidence and concluded that despite arguments to the contrary being pushed by Fauci and his cronies, the engineered virus argument was totally plausible and perhaps likely. They did not conclude that it was engineered, but they did conclude that the paper that Fauci commissioned and then used to “prove” the virus was of natural origin was total BS.

The paper referred to as Anderson et al. was the one Fauci commissioned in that panicked phone call after Anderson sent Fauci an email saying he thought the virus was engineered. After the paper was published, the researchers who wrote the paper received millions in grants from Fauci.

Needless to say, Fauci and NIAID were very touchy about the subject of COVID origins, and now we have his senior deputy requesting that scientists who were discussing the issue not use his government email because it could be FOIA’d.

Suspicious? Certainly. Legal? Probably not.

The evidence for a lab leak is near ironclad by now, and the evidence for COVID being engineered is compelling, if not conclusive. I believe that it is much more likely than not, but all the evidence is circumstantial. There are lots of circumstances pointing in that direction, but no smoking gun.

Still, the desperation to keep discussions out of the public eye provides yet more evidence that they definitely felt they had something to hide, and the inclusion of Daszek and others with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a record of gain-of-function research adds to the case.

One thing is clear: their contempt for the public. They believe we should sit down, shut up, and do what we are told. They kept us in the dark, and felt they had something to hide.

I think we all know what it is.