— David Morens, MD, admitted to trying to hide records related to the COVID pandemic
August 19, 2026
• 3 min read
David Morens, MD, a former top advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), pled guilty Tuesday in federal court to hiding government communications related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morens, who served as a top aide to former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, MD, from 2006 to 2022, was arrested by federal agents in April, and accused of using his private email to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to discussions on bat coronavirus research grants.
Morens and his “co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19,” then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement on April 28, the day Morens was indicted by the Justice Department.
The case centered around emails related to a grant for bat coronavirus research that the NIH terminated based on allegations that COVID emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which received a subaward from the main grant, prosecutors said.
Morens and others pledged to help restore the grant and “counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab,” according to prosecutors. They further alleged that Morens and others anticipated their communications would be requested through a FOIA request, so they agreed to hide them by using Morens’ personal email account instead of his NIH email.
“I learned from our foia [sic] 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.”
A co-conspirator, who appears to be former EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, PhD, allegedly gifted Morens wine for his help. In their communications, Morens allegedly also mentioned being deserving of the gift for “a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.” That is likely the proximal origins of COVID paper published in Nature Medicine that has become a lightning rod in the COVID origins debate.
In his plea agreement, filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, in Greenbelt, Morens attested that he “agreed with at least one other person to defraud the United States or commit offenses against the United States” and that he “knowingly and willfully joined the conspiracy.” The maximum penalties for Morens’ crimes are 5 years in jail, 3 years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine. His sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 12.
The plea deal comes a few weeks after Sen. Rand Paul, MD (R-Ky.), a longtime Fauci critic and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, held a hearing at which he and his fellow Republicans grilled Fauci regarding his role in the White House response to the pandemic. However, they didn’t get any response from Fauci, who pled the Fifth more than 100 times during the hearing.
“Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something — anything — that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,'” Fauci said in his brief opening testimony.
The committee later voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress.
