Chuck Darwin
Former National Institutes of Health official #Anthony #Fauci has faced many hostile questions from members of Congress,
but while appearing before a House panel on Monday, he’ll have something new to answer for:
a trove of incendiary emails written by one of his closest advisers.
In the emails, #David #Morens, a career federal scientist now on administrative leave,
described deleting messages and using a personal email account to evade disclosure of correspondence under the Freedom of Information Act.
“i learned from our #FOIA #lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts,
so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email.
“Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
The pressure is on, as Fauci himself prepares to appear today (June 3) before a House subcommittee exploring the origins of covid-19.
The NIH, a $49 billion agency that is the foremost source of funding in the world for biomedical research,
finds itself under unusual bipartisan scrutiny.
The subcommittee has demanded more outside oversight of NIH and its 50,000 grants and raised the idea of term limits for officials like Fauci,
who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an NIH component, from 1984 to 2022.
Lawmakers are likely to put Fauci on the spot about Morens’ emails at a time when Republicans are questioning NIH’s credibility and integrity.
Even Democrats have cautioned the agency’s leaders.
“When people don’t trust scientists, they don’t trust the science,” Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) told Morens.
⭐️The subcommittee has yet to turn up evidence implicating the NIH or U.S. scientists in the pandemic’s beginnings in Wuhan, China.
⭐️Nor has its work shed light on the origin of the virus.
⭐️But in a May 28 letter to NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli, the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Brad #Wenstrup (R-Ohio), said
the evidence “suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Rep. Jill #Tokuda, a subcommittee Democrat from Hawaii, said the evidence shows no such conspiracy.
She predicted the bipartisan criticism of Morens, 76, will give way to “a clash of intentions” at the hearing as Republicans try to pin covid on Fauci.
“For them, I think this is their moment to, again, bring a lot of these baseless, false allegations to the front,” Tokuda said.
On May 29, Wenstrup asked Fauci to turn over personal e-mails ahead of his testimony.
Here are things to know as the subcommittee gears up for Fauci’s appearance.
WHAT IS THE SUBCOMMITTEE LOOKING FOR?
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is supposed to be investigating
🔸how the pandemic started
🔸and the federal government’s response.
That includes such hot-button issues as 🔹vaccination policies and 🔹school closures.
🔥A central question is whether the covid virus leaped from animals to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, or spread from a leak at the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology.
💥The Wuhan lab received funding from an NIH grant recipient called EcoHealth Alliance.
The congressional probe is in some ways an extension of the nation’s political, cultural, and scientific battles arising from the pandemic.
👉The Republican-led subcommittee has been examining NIH’s performance and that of Fauci, who advised both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, becoming the face of many of the government’s most polarizing pandemic policies.
👉The panel called for the government to cut off EcoHealth’s funding, a process the Department of Health and Human Services recently initiated.
👉EcoHealth’s president, Peter #Daszak, was Morens’ friend and the recipient of many of the emails under scrutiny.
A wildlife biologist credited with helping to develop the first covid antiviral drug, #remdesivir, Daszak said he and his organization did nothing wrong.
“We were so accurate in our predictions that a bat coronavirus would emerge from China and cause a pandemic, that when it did, we’re dragged in front of the crowd with their pitchforks and blamed for it,” Daszak said in an interview.
WHAT’S AT STAKE FOR NIH?
The Republican-led subcommittee is challenging NIH’s credibility.
The agency performs and funds a wide variety of medical and scientific research, work that is often the foundation of new medicines and other treatments, and has long enjoyed bipartisan support from Congress.
The agency is home to the “Cancer Moonshot,” a Biden priority.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fauci-faces-congressional-committee-over-covid-e-mails/
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