**WASHINGTON — **A central element of the long-contested Wuhan laboratory story has moved from allegation to criminal admission: a senior official inside the health institute led by Anthony Fauci conspired with outside scientists to hide federal records while working to counter claims that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory.
David Morens, 78, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Greenbelt, Maryland, to conspiracy to commit offenses and defraud the United States. From 2006 through 2022, he served as a senior adviser in the Office of the Director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci led for thirty-eight years.
Morens’s admission does not prove that the pandemic began with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Western intelligence assessments, however, have moved the laboratory hypothesis firmly into the range of probability.
Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service reportedly assessed an 80-to-90-percent likelihood that the virus escaped accidentally from WIV. The Federal Bureau of Investigation favors a laboratory incident with moderate confidence. The Central Intelligence Agency now considers a research-related origin more likely than natural emergence.
Morens has admitted a different but related conspiracy inside the American system.
After the National Institutes of Health terminated a grant that financed bat-coronavirus research in Wuhan, Morens and his co-conspirators agreed in writing to conceal their communications while trying to restore the funding and “counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab,” according to the Department of Justice.
The terminated grant, *Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, *had been awarded to an American organization whose leader made a subaward to WIV. Although the plea record does not name the organization or its president, the grant title and structure correspond to EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak. Daszak has not been charged.
Anticipating demands under the Freedom of Information Act, Morens and his co-conspirators agreed to move their discussions onto his personal Gmail account. They used it to exchange nonpublic government information, edit letters intended to influence NIH leadership, discuss efforts to restore EcoHealth’s funding and send “back-channel” information to a senior NIAID official.
The judicial record does not name that official, although its description points to Fauci.
On July 29, less than three weeks before Morens pleaded guilty, Fauci appeared under subpoena before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Asked about the origins of COVID-19, dangerous biological research and his conduct in government, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times.
Morens also admitted conspiring with the unnamed organization leader in an illegal-gratuities arrangement. The leader sent wine to Morens’s home for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” Morens then identified an official act he could perform to “deserve” the gift: authoring a commentary for a prominent medical journal that advocated a natural origin for COVID-19. The leader also proposed meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York and Washington, prosecutors said.
Morens faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on November 12.
“By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did, and he will continue to do so,” his lawyer, Timothy Belevetz, said.
Fauci sought to distance himself from Morens during congressional testimony in 2024, saying they worked in different buildings and that Morens did not advise him on institute policy or other substantive issues.
In July, Senate Committee Chairman Rand Paul released internal messages among Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, authors of the influential March 2020 paper The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. The paper told the world that its authors did not believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario” was plausible.
The private discussion was different.
In June 2020, Andersen told the group that “we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other” and could not rule out that the virus’s furin cleavage site had been inserted.
“Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,” he wrote.
Andersen described Shi’s laboratory in Wuhan as taking bat coronaviruses and culturing them under biosafety level two conditions in animal cell lines to learn which could infect human cells and what mutations might make them capable of doing so. He wrote that the EcoHealth grant specifically funded that type of work. Given the information then available, he said, he found a natural origin and a laboratory origin “equally probable.”
Fauci accused Paul, his longtime Senate inquisitor, of conducting an “unhinged” campaign to have him imprisoned. His lawyer argued that he still faced possible criminal exposure despite the sweeping preemptive pardon President Joe Biden issued on his final day in office in January 2025.
The hearing followed the release of Fauci’s contemporaneous notes. In a June 2021 entry, he recorded a CIA briefing on intercepted communications and source reporting concerning military activity, pangolin sampling and unknown experiments in Wuhan. Fauci called the presentation “very fishy” and later described it as “the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the C.I.A. gave me.”
As The Bureau reported in July, documents released by Paul show that United States border officers intercepted three vials in November 2018 from a courier traveling through Detroit and turned them over to the FBI’s bioweapons unit, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. The courier initially declared no biological material, then said the vials had been given to him by Yusen Zhou of China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences for Fang Li, a federally funded coronavirus researcher at the University of Minnesota.
Government laboratory testing identified an antibody and a fragment of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus spike—a coronavirus component.
The American files link Li to Zhou, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) scientist, and to Shi. A postdoctoral researcher in Li’s Minnesota laboratory wrote a thesis on bat-coronavirus receptor analysis listing Li as principal investigator and Shi as the adviser in China.
Emails show that Shi asked Li in April 2018 whether a student could carry severe acute respiratory syndrome antibodies back to China by hand. Li declined, citing tensions between the United States and China, and proposed formal shipping.
The Detroit interception occurred during the same period that Canadian security investigators were examining a parallel network centered on Dr. Xiangguo Qiu at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.
On October 12, 2018, a security guard at NML stopped a WIV technician carrying ten vials out of Qiu’s laboratory while accompanied by restricted visitors, including a doctoral student from a PLA-affiliated veterinary institute. The contents of those vials have never been publicly identified.
Canadian intelligence later assessed that Qiu intentionally transferred scientific knowledge and materials to China for the benefit of Beijing and used Canada’s highest-containment laboratory to strengthen China’s capacity to work with dangerous pathogens. In March 2019 she organized an authorized shipment of Ebola and Nipah virus samples to WIV.
The Canadian records also placed Qiu and Shi in a 2018 Wuhan project intended to use reverse genetics to create synthetic bat-filovirus strains and assess cross-species infection and pathogenic risk. Qiu was listed as responsible for overall planning. A senior scientist and deputy director at WIV—identified by The Bureau through cross-referencing as Shi—was assigned project design. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service said the work suggested that gain-of-function studies might occur.
All of these records do not identify the source of COVID-19.
But in The Bureau’s assessment, they accrue to a mounting circumstantial case consistent with recent comments by former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo about how the pandemic unfolded—and what Beijing did once the virus began to spread.
At the May 7 Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa, Pompeo—who led the CIA before serving as secretary of state during the outbreak—said the United States government had “high confidence” and “good evidence” by late 2019 and early 2020 that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory. He said he did not believe its release was intentional. What followed, he argued, was. Xi Jinping “put people on airplanes and sent them to Europe,” Pompeo said. “He knew what he was doing then.”
