Former senior counselor of Fox confess guilt: from Damascus donation to Wuhan virus site, the hidden New Crown origin interest chain emerges

A former official at the heart of the top U.S. infectious disease decision-making agency has now admitted in a federal court that he is indeed involved in a conspiracy to escape public supervision.

On August 18, David Morens, former senior adviser to the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), admitted guilty to a federal court in Maryland for conspiring to circumvent U.S. public record laws and hiding government documents related to the coronavirus epidemic and research funding.

This has changed the nature of a congressional investigation that lasted for several years.In the past, the outside world saw deleted emails, private Gmail, congressional queries and internal government communications; now, one of the key participants has personally entered the federal court to confess guilt.

Really worth tracking is why Morens needed to hide these records.

The prosecution material released by the U.S. Department of Justice in April showed that Morens and others used his private Gmail to exchange NIH non-published information, modify letters submitted to NIH leadership, and pass information to senior NIAID officials through “back-the-scenes channels.”

And the agencies surrounded by these secret operations are the EcoHealth Alliance led by Peter Daszak.

This is not a peripheral institution that has nothing to do with the Wuhan Virus Institute. U.S. Congressional investigation confirmed that NIH provided $3.7 million in bat coronavirus research funding to EcoHealth in 2014; EcoHealth subsequently arranged some research work and funding to the Wuhan Virus Institute. The House of Representatives further investigated that EcoHealth funded and assisted Wuhan Virus’s high-risk coronavirus experiment and violated relevant reporting and supervision requirements. By 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Public Services had stopped funding and imposed a five-year government funding ban on EcoHealth and Daszak.

A truly shocking detail in the Morens case appears in the Justice Department’s allegations of “illegal donations.”

According to the Justice Department, a co-sponsor had donated wine to Morens for Morens’ “background operations” and arranged to send it to his Maryland home. Morens subsequently proposed that he could “deserve” the gift through an official act – writing a scientific review for a major medical journal claiming COVID-19 was of natural origin.

The prosecution material also said the co-sponsor suggested that he could continue to provide valuable benefits afterwards, including meals at Michelin-star restaurants in Paris, New York and Washington.

The boundaries of evidence must be cleared here: the above-mentioned content in the Justice Department prosecution is the prosecution’s accusation; Morens’ accusation confirms the core crime of conspiracy to circumvent the public recording system, which does not mean that each of the charges in the prosecution has been separately confirmed by a court ruling.

But even so, this set of facts still raises a question that could not have been raised so sharply in the past:

Why would senior government officials who fund Wuhan coronavirus research offering “background operations” discuss simultaneously publishing scientific articles about “natural origins” in return?

This is no longer an ordinary academic disagreement, but a matter of whether there is a conflict of interest between government power, research funding, private interests and public narrative of the origin of the virus.

The other end of this chain is Wuhan.

Congressional investigation argued that EcoHealth used U.S. taxpayer funds to support Wuhan Virus Research Institute coronavirus research and said that EcoHealth did not report a potential dangerous experiment outcome in a timely manner in accordance with funding conditions. Daszak himself admitted at Congressional questioning in 2024 that he could not know whether the Wuhan Virus Institute hid coronavirus samples or whether it had the ability to modify the virus without leaving visible traces.

This does not alone prove SARS-CoV-2 from the Wuhan Virus Research Institute.

But it means that any serious new coronary trace investigation cannot reasonably bypass the lab.

The outbreak first broke out in Wuhan; the Wuhan Virus Research Institute has long been engaged in the collection and experimental research of bat coronavirus; and U.S. government funding has been linked to the research network through EcoHealth. At the same time, the Chinese government has so far failed to provide the outside world with enough early case data, original experimental records and databases to allow independent investigators to complete auditing.

U.S. intelligence agencies have not yet formed a unified judgment: the FBI tends to laboratory-related origin, the CIA later tends to laboratory-related origin with low credibility, and other U.S. intelligence agencies tend to naturally spread.

Therefore, Morens’ confession cannot be written as “a court proof that the virus comes from Wuhan Labs.”

It proves another equally serious thing: Someone inside the U.S. government system has actually deliberately left the relevant records out of public surveillance around this background controversy.

Another set of materials, which were only further disclosed in 2026, re-examined the public narrative of "natural origin" itself.

In July, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs released an internal Slack communication between the authors of The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. The committee believed that the materials showed that some authors had seriously considered the possibility of laboratory-related origin in private discussions, while a paper finally published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 formed a public conclusion that the origin of the laboratory was significantly more excluded.

It must be reiterated that there is no legal evidence at the moment that Daszak directly “bought” the authors of Proximal Origin for research funding, nor can Morens’s proposed commentary be confused with the paper.

Really worth exploring is a larger structure.

On the one hand, the U.S. government’s millions of dollars in research funding and the long-standing cooperation of EcoHealth with the Wuhan Virus Institute; on the other hand, the public narrative of natural origins that emerged rapidly after the outbreak; and on the other hand, government officials secretly help EcoHealth deal with funding issues, use private mailboxes to escape the FOIA, exchange unpublished NIH information, and the link between the charges of the prosecutor’s donation and natural origin comments.

These clues are now drawn into the same criminal justice framework for the first time because Morens confessed guilty.

That’s why today’s case really needs to be tracked, and can’t stop at “a US official deleting a few emails.”

The public has the right to know: what records of Wuhan coronavirus research are hidden? who is involved in the decision to hide? what internal help has EcoHealth received? how many unpublished interests are there between Daszak and U.S. government officials? how the research, funding and information relationships between these people and Wuhan Institute have affected the public discussion of the origin of the virus after the outbreak?

Beijing cannot disappear from this chain of responsibility.

The Wuhan Virus Research Institute belongs to the Chinese Academy of Sciences system.The important original evidence that can truly ultimately rule out or support the laboratory-related origin—virus databases, experimental records, sample information, experimental health data and early outbreak data—is generated in China and is under the control of the Chinese regime.

If Beijing is convinced that the origin of the lab is unfounded, the most convincing way is not to make a political statement, but to open the original data to a truly independent audit.

For more than five years, this transparency has never appeared.

Morens’ confession did not therefore end the new coronary trajectory.

On the contrary, it raises a more dangerous question:

When Wuhan’s key original information is not fully independently reviewed, and someone inside the U.S. government system eventually goes to federal courts to hide communications related to research funding, what reason is there for the world to stop questioning the Wuhan Virus Institute?

Whether the new coronavirus ultimately originated from natural spills or laboratory-related accidents still requires evidence to make a final judgment.

But one thing is no longer mere speculation—there is indeed an act of man-made hiding government records and circumventing public supervision around Wuhan’s coronavirus research and new coronavirus traces.

And this time, it was not investigative journalists or congressmen who acknowledged this.

The people involved themselves.