By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

Dr. David Morens was Anthony Fauci's long-trusted assistant at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of many subdivisions of the National Institutes of Health. He worked there for nearly a quarter of a century, a job he snagged out of his training as a virologist and his tenure at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was loyal to his boss, clearly to a fault.

Now he is the first lamb sacrificed in what is likely to be a long series of prosecutions.

Morens, now 78 years old, has been indicted by the Department of Justice "with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting."

All of this is clearly documented in emails obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and Senate investigations, in which Morens is promised wine for his "behind-the-scenes shenanigans," and arranged for its delivery to his home. He was also promised – very likely by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, the recipient of Fauci's largesse – "additional things of value, including meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C."

Clearly something had gone very wrong in the normal affairs of state. What was the point of all this cloak-and-dagger? To cover up what everyone suspected, that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, that benefited from funding from the US government channeled through a favored contractor, the EcoHealth Alliance. Daszak himself was involved in the coverup in those early months, even authoring a very early (Feb 28, 2020) op-ed in the pages of the New York Times.

"As the world struggles to respond to Covid-19," Daszak wrote, "we risk missing the really big picture: Pandemics are on the rise, and we need to contain the process that drives them, not just the individual diseases." In other words: this is just Disease Xl; blame nature, not scientists in government.

In an April 21, 2021 email to Daszak, Morens wrote: "PS, I forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his [Fauci's] house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble."

In preparation for his grilling by the Senate on May 22, 2024, Morens wrote Daszak: "I should be prepared to be hit with criminal charges and firing and possible jail time for using my Gmail for supposed government business.…Please come visit me in prison and help me find a job when I get out. At least if that happens I will finally have the ability to speak out and write about what has been going on. I won't mince words."

The best we can hope for, then, is precisely what Morens promises: that once in prison, he will sing like a bird. He certainly knows vastly more than he has thus far said, as he admits. Or perhaps he avoids prison by turning on his past associates and ratting them out not only for the lab funding and leak but for what followed: the complete destruction of the country (and much of the world) with a lockdown awaiting an inoculation with a terrible efficacy and safety profile.

This is the real nub of the issue. For six years, people have wondered why it was so crucial for Fauci and his cohorts – among whom there were many, including actors in national security agencies – to work so hard to cover up the possibility of a lab leak, even to the point of commissioning a scientific paper to make the implausible case for a zoonotic origin. The best possible explanation is that they wanted to avoid culpability.

Another conspirator on the other side of the pond, Dr. Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome in the UK, jumped the gun with his 2021 book Spiked. He was a bit too forthcoming.

"In the last week of January 2020," he writes, "I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect...