Dr. David Morens, formerly an adviser to Anthony Fauci during the Covid-19 pandemic, has pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to conceal information about the pandemic. The charge focuses on attempts to conceal documents of the government by evading laws that allow members of the public to access records in the possession of the government.
The particulars of the charge brought against Morens in a Maryland federal court indicate that he undertook to conceal information about a research grant to a Chinese entity that had been identified as a possible origin of the pandemic.
Morens, aged 78, was indicted in April this year after prosecutors brought charges against him for executing a scheme in 2020 through which the federal agency where he was a senior official, the NIAID or National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had issued research grants focused on Covid-19. Several public records requests were sent to the agency at the time and Morens worked to keep some communications off the record so that the public couldn’t access them.
At the time, there was a research lab in Wuhan, China studying bat coronaviruses. This lab had received a sub-award from an entity that had received research funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). When an allegation was made that Covid-19 started when the virus leaked from this research lab, NIH decided to cancel the research grant linked to this Wuhan lab.
Prosecutors say Dr. Morens promised to help the company regain its grant and added that he would work to counter the allegations that Covid-19 resulted from a leak at the Wuhan lab. Thinking ahead, Morens and the people he was corresponding with agreed to use Morens’ personal email for their interactions so that any requests made through the Freedom of Information Act couldn’t result in their communication going public.
Now that Morens has pleaded guilty, he awaits sentencing on Nov. 12, and he could be jailed for a maximum of five years.
It should be noted that when Dr. Fauci appeared before a Senate committee inquiring into how the Covid-19 pandemic was handled, he repeatedly invoked his right to stay silent to avoid incriminating himself. This infuriated the panel and we are yet to see what other steps will be taken given that his former aide now faces a real risk of going to jail.
At the moment, no definitive explanation for the origin of Covid-19 has been determined. The CIA said the disease resulted from a lab-leak in Wuhan, but four other intelligence agencies in the U.S. say the disease resulted from the virus being transmitted from animals to humans.
What isn’t being debated is the need to increase access to advanced diagnostic tools for infectious diseases, especially those that can be reliably used in the field and at home. Enterprises like Co-Diagnostics Inc. (NASDAQ: CODX) are working to increase the available options of such tools.
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