The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said that it found evidence that Dr. David Morens, a key subordinate of COVID-19 pandemic response leader Dr. Anthony Fauci, used a personal email address and intentionally deleted federal records to hamper investigation into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Morens has been senior adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health since 1998 and was a senior associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 2001 to 2022. He also worked in various positions in the field of respiratory diseases for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before transitioning to the NIH.

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An email from Morens in September 2021 reveals him telling colleagues to use his Gmail address because his NIH address is "constantly" subjected to Freedom of Information Act requests. In the same email, Morens also alleges that his Gmail was hacked "probably by these [gain-of-function] assholes," a reference to people who had raised the possibility that the virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. He also said that he would "delete anything [he doesn't] want to see in the New York Times."

"These emails raise additional serious concerns about [Morens's] objectivity while stationed in the Office of the Director of NIAID — an agency that obligates billions of dollars annually," said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), the chairman of the subcommittee.

Another email obtained by the subcommittee from July 2021 indicates Morens's hesitancy to publicly address the origins of COVID-19 despite the fact that Fauci, whom Morens referred to as Tony, instructed him to speak on the record to National Geographic about SARS-CoV-2.

"I interpret this to mean that our government is lightening up but that Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories," Morens wrote.

In a letter sent by the subcommittee to Morens, Wenstrup also highlighted three instances in which Morens discredited other scientists for questioning the narrative on the origins and treatment of COVID-19. Morens advised other officials that they should "not rule out suing these assholes for slander" and compared those who postulated alternative hypotheses to the SARS-CoV-2 origin to Holocaust deniers.

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These revelations come on the heels of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence releasing a long-awaited report on Friday compiling the assessment of the intelligence community regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The report found the lab leak origin hypothesis of the virus, which postulated that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, unlikely, despite the fact that scientists in the lab affiliated with the People's Liberation Army were conducting research on coronaviruses.

"Dr. Morens’ troubling emails beg serious questions about his scientific objectivity as a NIAID official, his intentional suppression of differing opinions by encouraging wrongful litigation, and government bureaucrats’ influence over the public narrative of COVID-19 origins," the press release from the committee on the letter reads. "Public health officials are not above the law — especially in times of crisis."