Top NIH scientist urged allies to keep communications off official channels to evade public scrutiny
A big new lab leak revelation, and the Supreme Court targets affirmative action
The Supreme Court struck down admissions policies from Harvard and UNC today, ruling that they unconstitutionally take race into consideration. Their reading of the constitution is highly selective, of course, and for an alternative take you can read KBJ’s persuasive dissent.
But if you want to have hope in this moment, there is possibly (we don’t know, but we’ll find out) some solace in an argument long made by Richard Kahlenberg, that ending legal affirmative action will actually force elite institutions, which do value diversity outside of government mandates, to produce racially diverse classes using different, race-neutral metrics. And because race corresponds so tightly to class in America, that will nudge institutions to use class as a metric, which will benefit poor and working class Black and brown people, as well as poor whites. The current affirmative action regime often benefits minority groups such as recent immigrants from Nigeria, which has drawn criticism from those who argue that the top beneficiaries of the program ought to be Black descendants of slavery and Jim Crow. Kahlenberg argues that a class-first approach is paradoxically more likely to reach that cohort that a purely race-focused approach. More on Kahlenberg’s argument here from the Times. (If you run into a paywall, you can put the link into 12 Foot Ladder, which is a great resource, but don’t tell anybody else about it.)
Over at The Intercept, we have a big new lab leak story from Jimmy Tobias: “Top NIH Official Advised Covid Scientists To Use His Personal Email To Evade FOIA.”
He’s my guest on Deconstructed, which’ll be out later today or tomorrow morning, in which we also discuss his new story and also the recent release by the administration of a four-page declassified set of assessments related mostly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That declassification was a belated effort by the administration to comply with a law passed by Congress mandating the disclosure. It was a quite short and clear law, so rather than describe it, I’ll just paste here the relevant part:
Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of National Intelligence shall declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of (COVID-19), including activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People's Liberation Army; coronavirus research or other related activities performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak of COVID-19; and researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such researcher--
(i) the researcher's name;
(ii) the researcher's symptoms;
(iii) the date of the onset of the researcher's symptoms;
(iv) the researcher's role at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology;
(v) whether the researcher was involved with
or exposed to coronavirus research at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology;
(vi) whether the researcher visited a hospital
while they were ill; and
(vii) a description of any other actions taken
by the researcher that may suggest they were
experiencing a serious illness at the time; and submit to Congress an unclassified
report that contains--
(A) all of the information described under paragraph
(1); and only such redactions as the Director determines
necessary to protect sources and methods.
The resulting ODNI report fell absurdly short of what the law required, and reported vaguely:
“While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.”
The other rather jarring line in that statute for people not following this closely might be the reference to the People’s Liberation Army. When you start talking about bioweapons and the Chinese military and covid, you start to lose people who think you’re off in conspiracy land.
But there it is in the statute, requesting information, and here’s what the declassified report said:
“Although the WIV is independent of the People’s Liberation Army, the IC assesses that WIV personnel have worked with scientists associated with the PLA on public health-related research and collaborated on biosafety and biosecurity projects. Information available to the IC indicates that some of the research conducted by the PLA and WIV included work with several viruses, including coronaviruses, but no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.”
In other words, we have a lot left to learn, yet transparency has not yet become the norm in this conversation.
The Tobias story is worth a read in full, it’s pretty short, but here’s the top:
A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny.
“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”
After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
Morens is a 25-year veteran of NIH who serves as a senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position held by Fauci until his retirement late last year. Other scientists on the email exchanges include Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance; Robert Garry of Tulane University; Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney in Australia; Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research; and Angela Rasmussen, who works at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada. They have all been outspoken proponents of the natural origin theory of Covid’s emergence. Jason Gale, a journalist at Bloomberg, also participated in the email exchanges, which were first obtained by investigators from the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The email Morens wrote concerning FOIA, which was sent from his Gmail account, contradicted a footer under his signature line: “IMPORTANT: For US-government related email,” it said, “please also reply to my NIAID address.” Morens did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Scott Amey, the general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, said the conduct described in Morens’s email could potentially violate agency regulations, including the Department of Health and Human Services’s email records management policy, and potentially civil and criminal record retention laws.
“His comments in that email are certainly worth an investigation by the agency, the agency inspector general, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Department of Justice,” said Amey.
I do not know enough about these particular goings-on at NIH, but perhaps one should see this in the political context of the time: With the pandemic raging on, people refusing to vaccinate and furiously denouncing the recommendations to vaccinate and the enforcement, at shops for example, of the waring of masks as the product of yet another Deep State conspiracy, or whatever Trump and Co. were telling them at the time. While at NOAA, for example, scientists were being muzzled when it came to mentioning Global Warming as a real thing.
The origin of the pandemic was also (and still is) also something of political football, so for civil servants, at that time, to communicate their ideas in the way legally required of them, when these were contrary to that of the right-wingers in power at the time, was likely to be taking serious risks.
On the other topic put for consideration Grim with his comments, one may argue on the details of how affirmative action may be best applied depending on where it is, but the decision of the US Supreme Court with the favorable vote of the six right-wing members and the opposition of the three more liberal ones, is a disgraceful proof that this court, as a body, is not working necessarily in the public interest and that the six right-wing members that voted to end this decades old policy, meant to evening an historically tilted playing field, is diligently doing the job that successive Republican Presidents, with the approval of the then Republican majorities in the Senate, have put them in their current positions to do.