In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of individuals, companies, and NGOs, from California to Minnesota to Massachusetts, have come under investigation for fraud in taking money from the federal government.

Now the Department of Justice is investigating an insider in Dr. David Morens, M.D., a career advisor inside the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which came into controversy when it was learned that they had funded gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab where SARS-CoV-2 may have erupted.

There is nothing wrong with gain of function research, anti-science activists use the same basic concept when they give 10,000 doses of a weedkiller to rats and claim that means it causes human cancer, but it was shocking to learn they were giving money to a Wuhan Lab where a researcher had been arrested for selling laboratory animals to the wet market nearby. Though plenty of paid toadies promote China as being an intellectual superpower on social media, there safety protocols pale in comparison to the United States. 

Suspicions were confirmed when the communist dictatorship removed its entire database of coronavirus samples, some 15,000, and refused to let anyone inside the lab for nearly a year - and then handpicked those from the World Health Organisation allowed to visit the closed lab. Which had been scrubbed clean. Along with the wet market nearby.

Yet that is all circumstantial. Except he once ran an epidemiology group so he should have known better than to delete emails and tell others inside the government agency how to avoid FOIA requests - by using personal accounts to discuss sensitive government information.



His supporters will claim it was to avoid a witch hunt but scrambling to find ways to avoid his group being politicized, but they had politicized themselves long before the pandemic. Their desire to shield China from any investigation was overtly political.

Academic scientists circled the wagons around both Dr. Morens and EcoHealth Alliance while private sector scientists had long been concerned about sloppy protocols in China, and then that they were getting U.S. funding using a nonprofit as a slush fund.

No one believes China did this on purpose, coronavirus is too hard to control, as colleagues and I discussed in 2017's The Next Plague And How Science Will Stop It, but colluding with others in government to suppress concern that China was incompetent was both unethical and a breach of the public trust the American people should have in government science bodies.