Op-Ed: Michael Chamberlain: If it looks like FOIA evasion, walks like FOIA evasion, and quacks like FOIA evasion, it’s probably FOIA evasion
If somebody ever gets around to writing a tell-all history of The National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the COVID years, it’ll be a real page-turner. It has everything: smoking guns, a “FOIA lady who hates FOIA,” EcoHealth Alliance emails, Anthony “The Science” Fauci, and more.
There’s already more than enough material for that tome — and more coming every day. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a subpoena for the “FOIA lady” to come chat with them. But we need background. Our story so far:
Dr. David Morens was a top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci at NIH and NIAID. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Morens was obsessed with secrecy — rather an odd preoccupation for a public health bureaucrat. But obsession doesn’t always translate to facility, and the Subcommittee possesses — and has published — a trove of Morens’s emails, despite his telling colleagues in February 2021 that he learned from the NIH and NIAID’s “foia lady” how to “make emails disappear after [he was] foia’d [sic] but before the search starts.” The “foia lady” was “an old friend, Marg [Margaret] Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.” “FOIA lady” is referenced multiple times in the 155 pages of emails the Subcommittee published.
In April 2020, Morens apparently began using his private Gmail account to communicate about the pandemic, telling coworkers, “… NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail …” That went for “Tony” (Fauci?) too. In another email Morens wrote, “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.” But poor Dr. Morens just isn’t cut out for this cloak and dagger stuff. In an October 2021 email he complained, “I deleted that email but I now learn that every email iever[sic] got since 1998 is captured and will be turned over, whether or not I instantly deleted it.”
Called to account by the Subcommittee, Morens said his appeals to secrecy and mention of Moore were “a joke.” And when you consider that a man worried about having a smoking gun in emails ends up leaving entire batteries of still-hot howitzers around, it is pretty funny. But that’s extent of the comedy. Morens, Fauci, and others showed nothing but contempt for the right of the public to know what the agency does in its name. Margaret Moore received the Subcommittee’s subpoena because she refused a voluntary interview. In an apparent effort to evade FOIA, Fauci’s former Chief of Staff Greg Folkers deliberately misspelled words, such as “Andersen” as “Anders$n” and “EcoHealth” as “Ec~Health,” to stymie keyword searches.
The inclusion of EcoHealth in agency emails is truly disturbing. EcoHealth was the organization that received NIH grant money to conduct controversial gain-of-function testing in Wuhan, China because it was banned in the U.S. Many suspect that the pandemic originated when a souped-up virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dr. Fauci — a proponent of gain-of-function research — and others in the health bureaucracy hotly disputed that and regularly smeared “lab leak theorists.” At any rate, the Subcommittee has emails between Morens and EcoHealth head Peter Daszak discussing keeping documents safe from FOIA, away from the prying eyes of an American public that has every right to know about them.
The agency certainly seems to have been hiding something. And that jibes with the irresponsibility, obfuscation, and breaches of scientific integrity that have emerged in the public health bureaucracy since the pandemic.
The organization I lead, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), alone filed complaints over:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) refusal to track known severe negative reactions with its vaccine wellness tracking application; the 2022 false claim from CDC officials — including from Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky — that COVID-19 was among the top five causes of death for each age group of children from those <1 year through ages 15-19 years;
CDC’s recommendation that children receive the Pfizer vaccine despite its own data that led it to conclude that it had “very low” confidence that the Pfizer vaccine actually prevents symptomatic infection;
CDC and NIH did not publish large portions of the data they collected related to COVID-19, out of “fear that the information might be misinterpreted”;
A CDC press release and subsequent statement by NIH Director Francis Collins that “the vaccine provides better protection than the antibodies that you get from actually having had COVID-19,” when that was not even what the study they cited had investigated;
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s August 2021 recommendation, based on flimsy and misinterpreted evidence, that if “students maintain 3-6 feet of social distancing and are not within 3 feet of a person who has tested positive for more than 15 minutes then they do not need to quarantine.”
With that kind of track record, it is difficult not to suspect FOIA evasion was motivating the behavior of Morens, Moore, Folkers, et al. And in an utterly fitting postscript to this saga, Ms. Moore has refused to appear voluntarily for an interview with the COVID Select Subcommittee, and stated through counsel that she would plead the Fifth if subpoenaed to testify.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
