Secret NIH communications underscore the need for more independent oversight of risky scientific research.

Secret communications are the sine qua non of spycraft, and surprisingly, they were also quite in vogue at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not too long ago. It’s been six years since Covid-19 arrived on our shores, and from the time we began hearing about this deadly coronavirus, many in the public assumed that the NIH would be working overtime to discover its origins and develop therapies. So it came as a shock to discover that some of the executives at NIH spent a great deal of time trying to cover up what was going on behind closed doors. It’s a sordid tale that proves it’s long past time for Congress to ensure that such potentially dangerous research is subject to the public scrutiny needed to keep Americans safe and experts accountable.

David Morens, special adviser to Anthony Fauci for 20 years, devised strategies for evading the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We know this because Morens — helpfully, if inexplicably — left an email trail explaining how he evaded the law. He told fellow conspirators that he’d been taught by “our foia lady here how to make emails disappear,” even after they’d been subpoenaed. He explained to others how to replace the vowels in people’s names with symbols like the dollar sign. (The virologist Kristian Andersen was referred to as Krist$an And$rs$n to evade getting caught up in FOIA requests.) Those dollar signs are pretty ironic, when you consider that some critics insinuate that a $9 million NIH grant to Andersen in the spring of 2020 is what influenced his decision to flip his original conclusion that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan Lab to instead writing a paper concluding that Covid-19 is categorically “not a laboratory construct.”

Morens somehow thought he’d mastered the spycraft of secret communications. He wrote to one colleague, “Don’t worry, just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

Despite Morens expressing desire to destroy evidence, dozens of his emails have been discovered. In one email, Morens writes that he’s “connected [Fauci] to our secret back channel.” Morens helpfully explains that he can act as a courier to take paper messages to Anthony Fauci. At one point, Morens breathes a sigh of relief and explains to Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance that he’s deleted most of their early emails. “BOTH my gmail and phone calls are now safe. Text is NOT, as it can be FOIA’d, as can my govt email,” he writes.

You would think that bragging about being “safe” from legal and lawful public scrutiny and destroying evidence would lead to an indictment or at least a loss of your government job. But so far, neither has happened.

What incited all this secrecy? If you read the emails of Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and their inner circle of virologists, you sense their worry that some culpability might attach to their decisions to fund risky research in Wuhan.

Congress now knows what members of Anthony Fauci’s inner circle were saying privately about the origins of the virus — discussions that were only revealed through FOIA litigation. Kristian Andersen wrote, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin stressed the “nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess” regarding the possibility of inadvertent release given the scale of bat coronavirus research pursued in Wuhan.

Federal court orders yielded documents revealing that Fauci himself privately acknowledged concerns about “gain-of-function research” — research in which the genetic makeup of an organism is altered — in Wuhan and “mutations in the virus that suggest it might have been engineered” just days before he commissioned the paper designed to debunk any theories that the virus might have originated in the Wuhan lab.

Despite these private doubts, publicly, these so-called experts and their allies were dismissing the lab leak theory as a conspiracy. Within days, Andersen, Lipkin, and their fellow virologist coauthors were putting the final touches on what will be remembered as one of the most remarkable reversals in modern history.

In their “Proximal Origin” paper, these scientists concluded, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Media pundits parroted this narrative, while social media platforms censored discussions about the lab leak, labeling it as misinformation and stifling open discourse about the virus’s origins.

The cover-up went beyond public statements. Federal agencies and key officials withheld and continue to conceal crucial information from both Congress and the public. Despite Fauci’s denials that the research in Wuhan was not gain-of-function, acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak admitted in congressional testimony in May 2024 that, yes, the NIH funded the research and, yes, it met a general definition of gain-of-function.

These revelations have provided crucial evidence on the origins of Covid-19. The FBI, CIA, and the Department of Energy now conclude that Covid-19 resulted from a lab. Given the large-scale, long-term effects of the pandemic and government responses to it, the American people deserve complete transparency on the beginnings of the virus. Covid-19 killed millions of people and shut down global economies. Federal and state governments used the pandemic as a justification to strip Americans of their civil liberties and freedoms. Children missed critical developmental opportunities, people lost jobs, and businesses were forced to close.

Understanding the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is not just about assigning blame — it’s about learning from what happened so we can prevent future, more deadly pandemics and the negative societal consequences associated with them.

My goal is to uncover the truth, implement necessary safeguards, and prevent a tragedy of this magnitude from happening again.

While the executive branch has made some reforms, Congress has done nothing to add safeguards to gain-of-function research since the pandemic. Recently, a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Dr. Kevin Esvelt, demonstrated that they could still order off the internet the genetic components of the Spanish flu, which is estimated to have killed more than 50 million people. After warning the FBI, Esvelt ordered pieces of the Spanish flu from several different DNA synthesis companies and successfully constructed the genetic sequence of the influenza strain that killed tens of millions between 1918 and 1920. In 2024, Dr. Esvelt and former CDC director Robert Redfield testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that executive reforms are not enough and that Congress needs to create an independent commission to regulate dangerous gain-of-function research.

You don’t need to be convinced that the Covid-19 virus originated from a lab leak to recognize the imminent need for oversight mechanisms — the mere possibility that the virus could have emerged from such risky research should be more than enough to prompt decisive action. Gain-of-function research, which manipulates viruses to make them more lethal, poses a danger that some have compared to that of a nuclear weapon.

That is why I’ve introduced the Risky Research Review Act to codify independent oversight of dangerous scientific research funded by the federal government. My bill would establish an independent board within the executive branch to oversee federal funding for high-risk life sciences research, ensuring the protection of public health, safety, and national security.

The board would be composed of non-governmental scientific and national security experts who would have the responsibility of reviewing and approving high-risk life sciences research proposals prior to the release of federal funds. The bill would also implement mechanisms to ensure accountability from agencies and applicants applying for federal funds to conduct high-risk research.

My bill not only strengthens transparency but also ensures that public health decisions are made in the best interest of the American people, free from financial motives and prioritizing national security. The good news is, there is momentum. This bill passed out of my committee last summer. My hope is that Congress will continue taking action by embracing this reform in a bipartisan way and passing this legislation as soon as possible.

The American people deserve honesty from their scientific institutions and professionals. The erosion of trust during the pandemic underscores the need for a recommitment to these values, ensuring that science and medicine serve the public good without compromise. We must rehabilitate the name of science, our scientific community, and our government institutions.