This is great news. But America and the world can’t celebrate unreservedly — because Fauci himself is unlikely to face criminal jeopardy, owing to a sweeping preemptive pardon granted him by President Joe Biden. Yet that doesn’t rule out other forms of accountability for Fauci, such as civil torts. A deeper reckoning, moreover, may shed light on the creepy, long-running nexus between biological research and America’s national-security state.

Last week, Dr. David Morens — a senior adviser to Fauci during the Covid years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health — pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with two other people to hide evidence and defy public-records laws. The evidence in question: emails between Morens (and other government-linked scientists) and the British zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that used US government grant money to fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a report from the House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Gain-of-function research involves combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids, justified on the grounds of better understanding future infectious diseases. At least one US intelligence agency — the CIA — has already concluded that the novel coronavirus likely leaked from a Chinese lab doing just such work. And it is also reasonable to at least suspect that the US government’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance was part of intelligence efforts to keep tabs on Chinese research. 

According to the Department of Justice, Morens and two unnamed co-conspirators agreed “in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.” This was done, as the conspirators themselves made clear, to evade the transparency requirements of the Federal Records Act and the possibility of future exposure under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

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Among other things, Morens and his conspirators were trying to hide details related to a NIAID grant that helped fund experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China. One of these bat coronaviruses may have been a precursor to the Covid-19 virus, which likely escaped from the WIV in 2019.

Many of the incriminating communications have been posted online by the oversight committee of the US House of Representatives. Numerous emails implicate Fauci himself in the effort to evade public-records and transparency laws. For example, an email from Morens to a group of fellow scientists, including Daszak, dated April 21, 2021, contains the following: “PS. I forgot to say there’s no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Another email, from May 13, 2021, to the same group of scientists discusses having a friendly journalist “interview Tony [Fauci] directly and connect him to our ‘secret’ back channel. He emailed Tony a few days ago.” This suggests rather routine illegal use of private communication systems to coordinate official pandemic messaging, an effort in which Fauci himself was involved.

Daszak — widely suspected but not confirmed to be one of the unnamed conspirators — appears in many of the emails in which avoiding transparency is mentioned. An email dated April 21, 2021, from Daszak to a group of five other government-employed or -connected scientists, reads in part: “Please feel free to share any docs that I’ve sent to you, with Tony [Fauci]. Hopefully you can do that in a way that avoids [the Freedom of Information Act], and if not possible, just show him stuff on screen share on Zoom.”

In another email, Morens, referring to Fauci, tells Daszak; “If he needs further info, it might be best to connect you two, in an off-the-record manner. Would that be OK? We are getting FOIA’d nonstop, so it’s most important that Tony [Fauci] not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.” Daszak responded: “Totally agree. Tell him I’m happy to speak with him at any time and will do so in a way that’s not FOIA-ble.” 

In an email from November 18, 2021, Morens says: “Please pass this on to Peter [Daszak], and I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail, and make sure that what gets sent to my gmail doesn’t have a cc [carbon copy] to another government employee who could be FOIA’d.” There are many more statements of the kind in the public record, thanks to House investigators. 

The scientists’ obsession with secrecy, their fear of public scrutiny, tells us much about the politics of this pandemic. These people are fundamentally authoritarian. They despise democracy. They epitomize the arrogance of scientism: the worldview that treats science not as a means to gather certain kinds of facts, humble in the face of what it doesn’t know and subject to future revision — but as a total worldview, offering definitive answers to all questions, including the nonscientific, and elevating the expert himself to the status of a demigod. 

Their research was reckless. They suspected trouble. And they tried to hide it.

Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance are important in themselves and also because of the larger dynamics they reveal in the history of Covid’s origins. According to Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance-turned-whistleblower, the nonprofit was heavily involved with a USAID program called PREDICT, which ran from 2009 to 2019, and billed itself as an early warning system for zoonotic pathogens that might emerge from nature. 

Parallel to PREDICT, Fauci’s NIAID also wrote a grant for $8 million directly to EcoHealth Alliance so that it could help fund research into bat coronaviruses being conducted by Shi Zhengli, a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute. This research seems to have included gain-of-function enhancements on some of the bat viruses that may have made them more dangerous to people.

To be charitable, if collecting intelligence on China’s infectious disease research was the plan, the US government did manage to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was then one of China’s top virology labs. Less charitably, the government did so by using US taxpayer money to fund dangerous research in a sprawling and poorly run lab. While the Wuhan Institute of Virology did have Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in 2019, it also had numerous less secure facilities in the same building; some of the bat-virus research is alleged to have occurred in these lower-safety level labs.

In this light, the pandemic can be seen as the ultimate iatrogenic disaster. In an effort to combat pandemics, a secret arm of the government may well have funded research that inadvertently produced the very thing it was trying to prevent: a massive, deadly, economy-crashing pandemic.

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that the Trump administration, and especially health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., are now deeply ambivalent about the nature of the government’s likely efforts to keep track of other countries’ bioweapon research. On the one hand, if such spywork is funding dangerous research in order to get inside foreign laboratories, it can lead to unintended consequences … like a global pandemic. On the other, rival states and private actors do, in fact, conduct dangerous biological research that the US government might want to be apprised of. 

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A better way to mitigate the whole problem would be to refurbish the international treaty against biological weapons. That treaty, which outlaws offensive-oriented biological research and was highly effective in an earlier age, has a gaping loophole that allows high-tech biological research to continue as long as it is done in the name of medicine, public health, and biodefense. In other words, the great powers are still making the active ingredients in would-be weapons, but they are not making or testing delivery systems, nor do they deploy pathogens to the battlefield. However, as highly dangerous biological research advances, those old constraints become less important.

To understand how and why, it helps to revisit history. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the US government, along with most of its large allies and peer competitors, maintained offensive-oriented biological-weapons programs. During the pandemic, liberal journalists went out of their way to scoff at any mention of “bioweapons,” as if such a thing had never existed. But it did, and it is all a matter of public record.

However, by the late 1960s, American military leaders had turned against these so-called germ bombs, seeing biological warfare as dangerously unpredictable and dangerously accessible. In fact, the US brass referred to biological warfare as “the poor man’s nuke.” A number of accidents, including the mass poisoning of a herd of sheep in the American West, had led to public outcry from not only hippies, but heartland squares as well.

When Richard Nixon arrived at the White House in January 1969, he was met by large and persistent peace vigils demanding an end to US biological-warfare programs. Ten months later, in November 1969, Nixon announced the “unprecedented” unilateral end of America’s biological-weapons program. Quickly thereafter, the United States launched international negotiations aimed at ending bioweapons programs everywhere. In 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was agreed to. All signatory states were compelled to end their offensive research and to destroy their offensive biological weapon stockpiles by March 1975.

The treaty has mostly been a success. But there was that one loophole. States could continue doing research on dangerous pathogens as long as this was for the creation of “defensive medical countermeasures.” For a long time, this loophole meant little, in part because the barriers to such research were so high. However, by the early aughts, with the advent of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, dangerous tampering with pathogens became much easier and more common.

As more parties began tampering with pathogens, intelligence agencies around the world became increasingly eager to understand what their adversaries were doing. It is this drive that may have led to America’s probable efforts to access the premier virology lab of Washington’s main rival, China.

Diplomacy brought an end to offensive-bioweapons research among the major powers of the planet. But it left open the defense loophole. Real accountability, and a real reckoning with Covid, could, among other things, clear the path for diplomacy between the world’s great powers to amend the 1972 convention, so that the treaty effectively regulates the dangerous and increasingly accessible technologies of the 21st century.

The need to update the 1972 treaty has grown particularly acute in just the last year. Aided by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology is developing faster than ever, and in very dangerous ways. In July, researchers at the University of Minnesota created the first ever artificial life form, a one-celled organism, capable of limited division and replication, called the SpudCell. It is, as yet, unable to evolve or divide over many generations, which is why scientists don’t consider it fully alive. But that could change.

Less complicated and far more dangerous was news in early August that scientists had created a series of viruses that had been designed by AI. Hopes for medical breakthroughs were raised, but so were safety concerns about new synthetic diseases running out of control.

As Dr. Huff, the EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower, told me over the phone: “Universities in all the G20 countries have the capacity to create totally synthetic viruses. We no longer have to go poking around in nature to find dangerous viruses and then do gain of function on them. It’s now possible to create dangerous viruses from scratch.”

We need sunlight and lots of it on the history of Covid’s origins. This is not just about punishing a group of creepy insiders — though they certainly deserve it — it’s also about reining in and restructuring biodefense research of all sorts.

It’s easy to feel squeamish about discussing these matters. The facts, though well-documented, sound conspiratorial and haven’t broken through to the mainstream press, and therefore might hurt your credibility at the next dinner party. But that attitude is adolescent and painfully upper middle class. Now is the time to face the facts, no matter where they lead. A real reckoning on Covid is the first step towards effectively demanding that our governments refurbish the Biological Weapons Convention and take other steps so as to prevent another biomedical disaster.

The alternative may well be masks, lockdowns, censorship, online schooling, shuttered churches, vaccine passports, and exhortations to snitch on neighbors who fail to comply — in short, mass hysteria and authoritarian overreach all over again. 

Six years after a contagion that killed millions and wrecked the global economy, one of the great unanswered questions of Covid is, how did it begin? Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans reject what in 2020 was more or less the official (but outlandish) story: namely, that the novel coronavirus sprang from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and somehow jumped from bats — or pangolins? — to humans. 

This zoonotic theory of Covid’s origins still enjoys the backing of some scientists, but it is bedeviled by questions proponents can’t seem to shake off. For one thing, what was the intermediate animal that supposedly facilitated transmission? Who was Patient Zero? And how was it that the epicenter of the pandemic just happened to be located in Wuhan — one of a few virology labs in China authorized for research on dangerous coronaviruses?

That latter question points to a different hypothesis for Covid’s origins: that it resulted from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers had been conducting cutting edge “gain-of-function” research, combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids for the purpose of better understanding future infectious diseases. The lab-leak theory has been endorsed by at least one agency in the US Intelligence Community — the CIA.

Yet Americans and the wider world may never know the full truth unless these questions are subjected to a deep and rigorous examination — and a Fauci trial, conducted to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” may be the only means left for this. 

The justice system already appears to be tending in this direction. The Department of Justice this week charged David Morens — a former senior adviser to Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The government accuses Morens of conspiring against the United States and destroying records related to Covid’s onset, among other crimes (Morens is presumed innocent until proved guilty).

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The Morens indictment mentions “co-conspirators.” Americans must know: was his then-boss, Fauci, one of them? What we already know makes it implausible that he wasn’t. That makes a formal indictment all the more urgent for truth and accountability.

Since the early days of Covid, much of the scientific establishment has been working to discredit the lab-leak theory. As head of NIAID during the pandemic and the face of the government’s response, Fauci was a key player in this effort. Early on, he dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the notion that Covid might have been created in a lab and leaked by accident. Yet there are reasons to suspect that NIAID under the leadership of Fauci funded the research that may have created Covid.

The case against Fauci, if the Justice Department brings one in the coming days, will likely revolve around charges that he perjured himself in testimony before Congress about this question of research funding and Covid’s origins. At a Senate committee hearing in May 2021, Fauci categorically stated in a tense exchange with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that the NIH and NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. 

“You are entirely and completely incorrect,” Fauci snapped at Paul. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” At a follow-up hearing in July 2021, Fauci got into it again with the Kentucky senator, saying he didn’t retract his May statement about gain-of-function funding. At one point, he jabbed a finger at Paul and shouted, “If anybody’s lying here, senator, it is you!”

But this week’s indictment of Morens for concealing federal records related to the pandemic has revived the debate about Fauci and created new pressure on the Trump DOJ to revisit Fauci’s truthfulness before Congress. 

The records in question have to do with precisely what Fauci has repeatedly denied: gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — funded by an NIH grant. According to the indictment, Morens pledged to help “Co-Conspirator 1,” described in the indictment as the head of a US-based nonprofit, restore a canceled NIH grant for “Company #1.” The canceled grant was titled, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, and it was canceled amid allegations that Covid came from the Wuhan institute.

The descriptions of Co-Conspirator 1 and Company #1 point directly to Peter Daszak, former head of the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted a 2014 NIH grant to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. (Neither Daszak nor EcoHealth Alliance are named in the indictment, but reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere imply that they are indeed the person and entity referred to in the indictment). 

What’s more, the indictment alleges that these co-conspirators gave Morens “illegal gratuities” and wine for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it in a statement: “Morens … allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that Covid-19 had natural origins.”

To put the dots together: The government’s case against Morens suggests that the NIH did approve a grant that funded precisely the kind of research that could have created Covid, in the very city where Covid first appeared. Once the pandemic broke out and EcoHealth Alliance lost its NIH funding, Morens allegedly tried to help restore this funding in his official capacity as a senior NIH official, but concealed his efforts to do so. It follows that Fauci’s statements before Congress categorically denying such funding were false.

The indictment also corroborates a statement by NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak, who at a 2024 House committee hearing admitted that the US government funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Asked directly by then-Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) whether NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth Alliance, Tabak said: “It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research. If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

Splitting hairs over what exactly constitutes gain-of-function research, or what the accepted definition of the term is, was a recurring feature of Fauci’s sparring in Senate hearings with Paul and other lawmakers during the pandemic. At a Senate hearing in November 2021, Paul brought up the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted to the Wuhan lab through its 2014 NIH grant. Fauci responded by calling Paul’s line of questioning an “egregious misrepresentation,” and insisting that his characterization of the research didn’t meet the NIH’s definition of gain of function, which was formalized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in January of 2017.

Yet Fauci’s own past statements uphold Paul’s definition of gain of function. In a June 2021 letter, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan — then the Republican ranking members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on the Judiciary, respectively — asked Fauci to reconcile his past statements with his May 2021 assertion under oath that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. 

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The letter quoted Fauci at a 2012 conference on gain-of-function research at which he said: “what historically investigators have done is to actually create gain of function by making mutations, passage adoption, or other genetic techniques, such as reverse genetics.” The letter then quoted the 2014 NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which allowed it to “test predictions of [coronavirus]…transmission…using reverse genetics…” In other words, NIH was contracting research that fit Fauci’s own definition of gain of function. 

“Using your own definition,” wrote Comer and Jordan, “it appears the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology].” They closed their letter by asking Fauci to “explain the apparent discrepancy in your recent testimony.”

Fauci, who once claimed to personally embody science, has been widely criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts. In addition to his shifting statements about masking and social distancing protocols during the pandemic, he was secretly involved in a widely cited March 2020 paper published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine on the “proximal origins” of Covid. The paper was designed specifically to discredit the idea of a lab leak. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors stated. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Fauci mentioned this paper to White House reporters in April 2020 as evidence against the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — without revealing that he had been involved in its creation, as emails released in a congressional inquiry eventually revealed. RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Thacker uncovered that Fauci admitted during a multiday deposition by the House Oversight Committee in 2024 that he had indeed read multiple drafts of the paper, and even emailed with the authors about it. Yet Fauci had previously told The New York Times that he wasn’t sure if he ever got around to reading the paper.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as water under the bridge. The pandemic is over, Fauci is out of the government. In the words of that infamous 2022 essay in The Atlantic, can’t we just declare a “pandemic amnesty” and move on?

In a word, no. As RealClear’s Thacker has noted elsewhere, while “dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal.” More than any other single person, Fauci was in a position to shed light on the origins of Covid at the moment the pandemic arrived on American shores. It might have required coming clean about what the NIH and NIAID had been funding in China on his watch, and it might have even required him to resign in disgrace over the scandal such an admission would cause.

But it would have been the right thing to do. In addition to helping government officials and medical providers better understand what we were dealing with, possibly even saving American lives, it would have opened up space for a reckoning about what US tax dollars had been paying for overseas. Later, there might have been a chance at accountability for those responsible for funding reckless gain-of-function research.

 Instead, Fauci dissembled about what he knew, the government’s role, and the part he himself played in all of it. There is still a chance to hold him at least partially accountable. But time is running out.