June 21, 2024
Source: Bloomberg
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
Anthony Fauci's Covid Text Messages Revealed
Don’t expect any bombshells. Fauci appeared to be aware that his correspondence would be scrutinized and avoided saying anything controversial.
Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing in Washington, DC on Monday, June 3, 2024.
I’m going to cut right to the chase. I recently obtained dozens of Anthony Fauci’s text messages from his government issued mobile phone. They were released to me in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit I filed against the National Institutes of Health and its division, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
I sued the agency in 2020 because I wanted to see how Fauci, who was director of NIAID for nearly four decades, responded behind the scenes as the Covid pandemic surged.
Deny and delay
Fauci’s text messages haven’t been previously disclosed. I’m breaking them out now because the issue of transparency at NIAID, or lack thereof, made national headlines earlier this month when Fauci testified during a hearing of the House subcommittee investigating the origins of Covid and the government’s response.
NIAID had already given me thousands of pages of Fauci’s emails. But the agency wasn’t eager to turn over his text messages. More than three years after I filed my initial request, and then sued, NIAID claimed that I’d dropped that portion of my request and therefore wasn’t entitled to the text messages. Me? Drop part of my FOIA request? No way!
It was just one of many tactics by NIAID to skirt transparency after Covid was declared a pandemic. Ultimately, after weeks of back and forth last summer, NIAID backtracked and started releasing the texts, one of which merited a brief mention in a recent edition of FOIA Files. This is what I’ve gotten so far: 42 pages of texts with about 15 people.
If you’re hoping for a smoking gun that will shed light on how Covid began I’ve got bad news: It’s not in this stack. Instead, the messages largely center around the important people who reached out to Fauci in Covid’s early days, apparently seeking his expert advice and access to him as the pandemic turned him into a celebrity.
Fauci didn’t respond to many of the text messages. In the few instances he did, his replies were terse, not unlike the way he responded to emails.
In one text message, Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah implored Fauci to implement stricter quarantine measures for seniors to keep infection rates down – “No restaurants, no movies, no shopping, no airplanes, no going to work,” he wrote. In response, Fauci said he’d bring the recommendation to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which was chaired by Vice President Mike Pence.
When Romney texted Fauci again on March 20, 2020 about “best practices” and what the US could learn from China and South Korea’s approach to testing and quarantines, Fauci replied, “I hear you, Senator.”
One of the earliest messages, from a former NIH employee, is dated Feb. 2, 2020, a month before Covid was declared a pandemic. It was surprisingly upbeat — and emoji-laden — given that we now know a global catastrophe was fast approaching.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who at the time was the former surgeon general, sent Fauci a text message on March 8, 2020, three days before Covid was declared a pandemic, seeking his guidance.
There wasn’t a response from Fauci in the texts.
Then-Louisiana Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards sent Fauci a text on April 27, 2020. He gave Fauci “a heads up” that he spoke to Pence and “decided to keep the stay at home order in place in Louisiana until May 15 so we can increase testing and contact tracing capacity.”
The texts did not contain a reply from Fauci to that message either.
Fauci also received texts from journalists, underscoring the close relationship he had with those who covered him. In one exchange, the since-ousted New York Times reporter Donald McNeil sent Fauci a message boasting that he’d acquired a “Tony Fauci bobblehead doll.”
Click here to view the texts (page 19)
Other text messages included discussions with senior government officials and scientific researchers about Covid funding, vaccine development, and a Q&A with NBA star Stephen Curry.
“The FOIA lady”
While NIAID is still slowly rolling out records responsive to my FOIA, I’m not expecting anything controversial in any forthcoming Fauci messages. That’s because Fauci appeared to have been aware that his correspondence would be subject to FOIA requests like mine. Fauci’s adviser, the scientific researcher David Morens, said as much.
In 2023, emails from Morens were subpoenaed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which was investigating the government’s response to the pandemic, and whether Covid was the result of a leak from a Chinese lab, as opposed to natural transmission.
In one email Morens said Fauci “is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” and indicated that any sensitive correspondence between the two would instead be sent to Fauci’s personal Gmail account, if not personally handed to him.
Attempts by Morens, who is now on administrative leave, to evade FOIA were more brazen than that.
Last month, in committee testimony, Morens addressed an email he wrote that described how NIAID’s “FOIA lady” had trained him in the dark arts of evading the FOIA and violating federal record keeping laws. He wrote that he purged his emails and used a personal Gmail account to conduct official government business related to the pandemic because his work email is “FOIA’d constantly.”
“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’re all safe,” Morens wrote.
“The best way to avoid FOIA hassles,” Morens wrote in another email, “is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive.”
Emails in the cache also showed that other NIAID officials used what the committee called “FOIA evading tactics,” including purposely misspelling names so they wouldn’t turn up when FOIA searches were conducted.
Can you all feel my blood boiling?!
Culture of secrecy
A staff memo released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic alleged that Fauci was also in on the FOIA-evading scheme.
Representative Brad Wenstrup, the Republican committee chair, sent a letter to the NIH director, alleging “a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”
He demanded that the agency answer questions about “NIH’s document retention, transparency, FOIA, and personal e-mail policies.”
An NIH spokesperson declined to comment on Morens’ email practices, but said in a statement to FOIA Files that it is "committed to the letter and spirit of the Freedom of Information Act and adherence to Federal records management requirements.” The spokesperson also said agency policy requires personnel to "refrain from using personal email accounts to conduct NIH business."
The National Archives and Records Administration ensures that agencies adhere to the Federal Records Act, which describes how agencies should handle the preservation and disposition of government records. When the Archives learned last year that Morens said he expunged his emails and conducted government business on Gmail, the agency’s chief records officer, Laurence Brewer, sent a letter to the NIH. In it he called for an investigation as well as a “comprehensive report within 30 days detailing NIH's findings.”
A couple of weeks ago, I filed a FOIA request for that report. In keeping with its culture of secrecy, NIH responded to my request three days later saying the entire report was exempt from disclosure, citing one of FOIA’s most abused exemptions.
Fauci, in prepared testimony of his own days after Morens’ appearance, told the committee that “to the best of my knowledge, I have never conducted official business using my personal email.”
Unredacted
What’s certain, however, is that early on in the pandemic NIAID went out of its way to keep a close hold on any information about its work with Chinese virologists and its characterization of those who questioned the lab leak theory. When the lab leak theory first surfaced four years ago, anyone who backed it was ridiculed or branded a conspiracy theorist.
In its initial responses to my FOIA lawsuit, NIAID provided me with a handful of emails between Fauci and Peter Daszak, the embattled president of EcoHealth Alliance, and a recipient of a grant to conduct virus studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak, who has been accused by critics of starting the pandemic, was also the recipient of many of Morens’ emails about thwarting FOIA requests.
In an April 18, 2020 email, Daszak thanked Fauci for “publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The next paragraph in Daszak’s email was originally redacted, citing an exemption under the FOIA that related to ongoing law enforcement proceedings. A year later, the agency reprocessed the emails and resent me the documents, along with a cache of other records.
The agency said the redactions “were no longer necessary.”
Seeing the paragraph restored, it strains credulity to suggest that its disclosure would have interfered with any enforcement activities.
The email that NIAID redacted and later unredacted (pages 1 and 2)
‘It’s been a very hard few months as these conspiracy theorists have gradually become politicized and hardened in their stance,” Daszak wrote. “Especially because the work we’ve been doing in collaboration with Chinese virologists who have given us incredible insight into the risks that these viruses represent so we can directly help protect our nation from bat-origin coronaviruses.”
Have you taken the vaccine? Were you mandated to? By whom?
Share the wealth of health with your friends and family by sharing this article with 3 people today.
If this article was helpful to you, donate to the Shidonna Raven Garden and Cook E-Magazine Today. Thank you in advance.
コメント