WASHINGTON — A federal grand jury has indicted the man who served for nearly two decades as Anthony Fauci’s closest aide at the National Institutes of Health, accusing him of conspiring to conceal the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, destroy federal records, and accept bribes from Peter Daszak, the head of a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance that had funneled American government grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The alleged gratuities — bottles of The Prisoner Red Napa Valley wine delivered to his Maryland home, and promises of Michelin-starred meals in Paris, Washington, and New York — were payment, prosecutors contend, for writing a scientific paper endorsing the theory that the virus emerged naturally from animals rather than a Chinese government laboratory.
The indictment names no individuals beyond the defendant, Fauci’s aide David M. Morens, 78. But a comparison of its allegations with congressional testimony and the documented public record establishes with near certainty that Fauci, Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, and other figures at the center of the Wuhan Institute’s bat coronavirus research — among them University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, referred to in the charging document as “North Carolina Scientist 1” — are the players described in its most explosive passages.
The indictment, unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Maryland, is the most significant criminal action to date flowing from years of congressional investigation into whether senior American health officials deliberately suppressed evidence pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the pandemic’s source.
The conspiracy the indictment alleges ran from approximately April 2020 through at least June 2023 — more than six months after Morens retired from NIH at the end of 2022. At its core, the Morens case is about whether the most consequential scientific and public health question of the 21st century — where did COVID-19 come from — was deliberately obscured by the people best positioned to answer it, using the tools of science and public service as cover. The indictment alleges a systematic effort to ensure that the theory of a Wuhan lab origin was never seriously pursued — protecting both the official narrative and the millions of dollars in federal grants flowing to EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that had not only funded the Wuhan Institute’s coronavirus research but conducted it jointly.
The case is built on emails — and the deletion of emails. The wine, prosecutors allege, came with a note from Co-Conspirator 1 — whose description in the indictment matches Daszak’s — that was explicit about what it was for, thanking Morens for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans” against the senior officials he served. Some of those emails, as the pages that follow make clear, contain sentences that reframe not only the origins of COVID-19, but the government’s conduct during the crisis and in the years that followed.
Two months after the wine arrived, the exchange grew more explicit still. On approximately August 27, 2020, after the National Institutes of Health awarded Co-Conspirator 1’s organization a $7.5 million grant — the same funding stream the conspirators had feared the bat coronavirus grant termination might jeopardize — Morens emailed Co-Conspirator 1 from his NIH account: “Ahem…. do I get a kickback???? Too much fooking money! DO you deserve it all? Let’s discuss….”
Co-Conspirator 1 responded: “of course there’s a kick-back [...] I just hope it doesn’t culminate in 5 years in Federal jail.” The men who would spend the next two years allegedly evading federal oversight were, in the summer of 2020, joking about federal prison.
To understand how they got there, it helps to understand the triangle.
At one point stood Anthony Fauci — almost certainly “Senior National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Official 1” in the charging document — the most powerful infectious disease official in the United States government. At another stood Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance and almost certainly “Co-Conspirator 1,” whose organization had funneled federal grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research under a grant titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” — a program that included a direct subaward to the institute itself. Between them stood Morens — Senior Advisor to Fauci from approximately 2006 through December 31, 2022, preparing him for congressional testimony and White House briefings, ghostwriting policy documents, and serving as the conduit through whom Daszak’s interests reached the director’s desk. Fauci has not been charged with any offense and has consistently denied wrongdoing.
When the National Institutes of Health terminated EcoHealth Alliance’s bat coronavirus grant in April 2020 — amid suspicions that a lab incident at the Wuhan Institute had caused the pandemic — that triangle, prosecutors allege, became a conspiracy.
The transaction at the center of the indictment’s gratuity allegations began with those two bottles of wine and a note that prosecutors have now placed before a federal grand jury as evidence of corruption.
On approximately June 25, 2020, Co-Conspirator 1 sent the wine from Bounty Hunter Rare Wine & Spirits, delivered to Morens’s Maryland residence. The accompanying note, reproduced in the indictment, was explicit about what the gift was for. Co-Conspirator 1 wrote that it was the first of what he hoped would be “a continued series of expressions of gratitude for your advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans in my battle against your bosses boss, his boss, and the ultimate boss on the hill.” He called the arrangement an act of courage, given “the vindictive nature of the Administration,” and closed: “I am eternally grateful for that, and hope I will be able to return the favor one day. In the meantime...Cheers!”
Upon receipt, Morens emailed Co-Conspirator 1 from his Gmail account: “Now i am actually going to have to do something to deserve it. Let me think….” He then enumerated acts he had already performed on Co-Conspirator 1’s behalf — including writing a scientific commentary that outlined the importance of Co-Conspirator 1’s work, deliberately crafted to omit any mention of Co-Conspirator 1 or the grant termination. Eight days later, on July 3, 2020, Morens submitted that commentary to a prominent medical journal, advocating that COVID-19 had emerged from nature and not from a lab. The piece was funded in part, the indictment notes, by the intramural research program of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — the same agency whose records Morens was simultaneously conspiring to destroy. American taxpayers, in other words, helped fund the paper prosecutors allege was produced as a corrupt official act.
Co-Conspirator 1 was not finished. On June 26, 2020, the day after the wine arrived, he emailed Morens describing further gifts as a “phase II” offering, and suggested that “phase III might actually involve a meal — the Michelin starred restaurants are opening in Paris — DC and New York will do eventually!” Prosecutors allege this was a deliberate, escalating structure of illegal gratuities.
The Freedom of Information Act evasion scheme documented in the indictment’s overt acts section is meticulous and prolonged — more than twenty specific acts spanning April 2020 through late 2022, all directed at ensuring that communications between the conspirators would never surface in response to public records requests.
It began almost immediately after the grant termination. On approximately April 25, 2020, after learning about the cancellation, Morens forwarded his National Institutes of Health communications to his personal Gmail account and emailed Co-Conspirator 1 and a second co-conspirator: “This is sent from my gmail account. Please send all replies here To gmail.” The following day, Co-Conspirator 1 wrote back: “David — We’ll communicate with you via gmail from now on.”
On approximately May 3, 2020, Morens emailed members of a prominent professional medical organization enlisting their support for Co-Conspirator 1, writing: “I need to keep this correspondnce [sic] off of USG emails for obvious reasons, so am sending from gmail [...] I am under Multiple FOIAs already.”
By May 15, 2020, Morens was telling Co-Conspirator 1 that the NIAID Freedom of Information Act officer had coached him on how to cover his position by deleting emails and exploiting processing delays, and that he would soon need to train himself to use only Gmail. The following day, writing about an article he was drafting for Co-Conspirator 1’s benefit — one prosecutors allege was designed to keep the fingerprints of “North Carolina Scientist 1” and EcoHealth Alliance colleagues off the piece entirely — Morens concluded: “I need to keep this off of govt email and govt phone text.”
The scheme extended well beyond deleted emails.
On approximately March 29, 2021, Morens edited Co-Conspirator 1’s formal written response to the National Institutes of Health Deputy Director for Extramural Research regarding the bat coronavirus grant. When Co-Conspirator 1 submitted that letter to NIH on April 11, 2021, he did not disclose that his senior advisor at NIAID had helped write it. Morens was simultaneously a federal official and the undisclosed ghostwriter of a grantee’s regulatory submissions to his own agency.
The substance of that ghostwriting makes the conflict of interest more troubling still.
Among the edits Morens contributed, reproduced in the indictment, was language defending the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s biosafety record — arguing the lab had been built to international safety engineering standards, that its lead staff had been trained in the United States by a known authority running the BSL-4 facility at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and that no credible safety concerns had been raised by anyone beyond a single individual.
A senior federal health official was secretly drafting the talking points used to rebut public concern about the very laboratory at the center of the pandemic origins question — on behalf of the grantee whose financial relationship with that laboratory prosecutors allege he was being paid to protect.
The indictment also introduces a third co-conspirator — described as a physician, scientist, and professor at an academic institution that received National Institutes of Health grant money, who served as a Co-Investigator with Co-Conspirator 1 on a grant application filed in June 2019 and awarded in summer 2020. This figure appears throughout the overt acts, coordinating evasion strategies and serving as an intermediary between Morens and Co-Conspirator 1 when direct contact carried exposure risk. His identity is not disclosed in the charging document.
By February 2021, Co-Conspirator 2 was instructing Morens to watch the email address he used, warning: “If you get FOIA’ed and have to respond it will have [Co-Conspirator 1], and, of lesser importance, me on the correspondence. The less we provide the enemy the better.” On approximately February 24, 2021 — the email already in the congressional record — Morens wrote to his co-conspirators: “[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. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
In June 2021, Morens circulated an email to the group under the subject line “CONFIDENTIAL WITHIN OUR SMALL GROUP, PLEASE,” writing that he had “retained very few documents on these matters, and continue to request that correspondence on sensitive issues be sent to me at my gmail address.” In December 2021, he emailed the chair of Co-Conspirator 1’s organization under the subject line “[Co-Conspirator 1] and the Salem Witch Trials,” lobbying for his colleagues and reminding recipients to “keep all communications like this on private email so that it can’t be retrieved via a FOIA.”
When Morens was hauled before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in May 2024 and confronted with these communications, he attributed them to black humor.
The indictment contains one detail that, taken in full context, reframes the entire story of what the United States government knew about the origins of COVID-19 — and which officials were positioned to shape the world’s understanding of it.
By January 2021, the alleged back-channel had reached into the official WHO origins mission itself. Co-Conspirator 1 — whose description in the filing points almost certainly to Peter Daszak — was then in China as the only U.S. member of the WHO team investigating COVID-19’s origins. From there, prosecutors allege, he asked Morens to route a message through “Senior NIAID Official 1,” a figure the public record strongly indicates was Anthony Fauci, seeking State Department information that could be shared with the WHO team. He also asked Morens to deliver a broader message: that the only way to understand these viruses and guard against “the next COVID” was to keep working with Chinese counterparts.
The man prosecutors allege was engaged in a multi-year scheme to suppress investigation into a laboratory origin — deleting records, evading public records requests, producing scientific papers designed to protect his organization’s grants — was simultaneously representing the United States at the international investigation into COVID-19’s source. He used that position to lobby, through a covert back-channel to the nation’s top infectious disease official, for deeper scientific cooperation with the same Chinese institutions at the center of the inquiry.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Identifications of unnamed individuals in this story are drawn from cross-referencing the indictment’s descriptions with congressional testimony, Freedom of Information Act disclosures, and the documented public record. The identification of “North Carolina Scientist 1” as Ralph Baric is based on his publicly documented role as a collaborator on coronavirus gain-of-function research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology; he has not been charged with any offense and is presumed innocent of any wrongdoing. The indictment is a charging document, not a finding of guilt. All individuals are presumed innocent.
