By Eight years before COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci ordered an aide to permanently erase an email exchange about federally funded research that made a deadly bird-flu virus transmissible through the air.
“Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file,” Fauci wrote from his National Institutes of Health account in March 2012.
The newly released documents, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, provide the earliest known example of Fauci instructing another government employee to eliminate an official communication. They also add to a much larger pattern involving disappearing records, private email accounts and efforts to keep the public from seeing how federal health officials handled dangerous research.
Fauci did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.
The revelation comes less than two weeks after New Conservative Post reported that David Morens, Fauci’s longtime senior adviser, pleaded guilty to conspiring to hide federal records involving coronavirus research, EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Morens admitted that he and others moved sensitive discussions to his personal Gmail account to evade Freedom of Information Act requests and federal-records requirements. Prosecutors have not accused Fauci of participating in that conspiracy, but court filings indicate Morens and his associates used back channels to pass information to Fauci’s office.
The 2012 email also follows the release of two similar instructions from 2020. In one exchange, sent one day after the conference call that led to the influential “Proximal Origin” paper, Fauci told then-NIH Director Francis Collins: “Please delete this e-mail after you read it.” In another, Fauci told his chief of staff to delete an email discussing Sen. Rand Paul.
Paul said the messages contradicted Fauci’s 2024 testimony that he had never deleted federal records or instructed others to evade federal recordkeeping requirements.
As New Conservative Post reported in July, Fauci later invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer Paul’s questions about COVID-19, taxpayer-funded research and his previous testimony.
The date of the newly released email is particularly notable. President Joe Biden’s extraordinary preemptive pardon protected Fauci from potential federal prosecution for conduct beginning Jan. 1, 2014. The official pardon does not cover conduct from 2012, although statutes of limitation and whether the exchange qualified as a federal record would present separate legal questions.
The controversy began in 2011 when Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier announced that his NIH-funded laboratory had altered H5N1 bird flu so it could spread through the air between ferrets, which are commonly used to model influenza transmission in humans. H5N1 had killed more than half of the people with confirmed infections, although the modified airborne virus’s potential lethality in humans was unknown.
Fouchier nevertheless described his creation as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity initially recommended that journals withhold the experimental details because terrorists or other researchers might use them to reproduce the virus. Fauci opposed that recommendation.
In a December 2011 Washington Post article titled “A flu virus risk worth taking,” Fauci, Collins and vaccine researcher Gary Nabel argued that such experiments could help scientists prepare for similar viruses emerging in nature.
The New York Times editorial board responded with “An Engineered Doomsday,” warning that the research could produce a virus capable of killing “hundreds of millions of people.”
“The consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk,” the editorial stated.
The new emails identify Times science writer Philip Boffey as the author of the unsigned editorial. Boffey followed it in March 2012 with “The Truth About the Doomsday Virus?” questioning Fouchier’s attempts to soften his earlier description of the experiment.
One passage focused on NIH’s institutional interest in defending the work: “Now, this country’s National Institutes of Health, which financed the research and has its own reputation on the line, is asking the [NSABB] to reconsider its call to redact details before publication.”
That sentence appears to have particularly angered Fauci.
“Phil Boffey is really off base here,” Fauci wrote to Collins on March 4, 2012. “He is acting like a mischievous guy.”
The following morning, Fauci told a subordinate: “Clearly, people are getting to Phil Boffey and he is swallowing it.”
Fauci warned that if the biosecurity board did not reverse its recommendation, “the field of research on influenza … has a serious problem.” He then instructed the aide to delete the email and remove it from the deleted folder.
The board later changed its position after reviewing revised manuscripts and recommended full publication of Fouchier’s study.
Fouchier would reappear eight years later in the private discussions surrounding “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the paper Fauci repeatedly cited to dismiss claims that COVID-19 may have emerged from a laboratory.
Emails later showed that Fouchier supplied central arguments to the paper without being named as an author. The paper’s credited authors privately described him as “unbelievably conflicted.”
“Ron … is not going to want it to be a GOF [gain-of-function] escape,” one wrote.
Fouchier also opposed publicly addressing a possible laboratory accident because doing so could cause “harm to science” by reviving the debate over risky virus research.
“This manuscript would be much stronger if it focused on the likelihood of the first two scenarios as compared to intentional or accidental release,” Fouchier wrote. “That would also limit the chance of new biosafety discussions that would unnecessarily obstruct future attempts of virus culturing for research and diagnostic purposes for any (emerging/zoonotic) virus.”
The new email does not prove that a laboratory accident caused COVID-19. It establishes something more basic: Long before the pandemic, Fauci and the scientists he funded understood both the catastrophic risks of their research and the threat that public scrutiny posed to their reputations.
When that scrutiny arrived, Fauci’s response was not merely to defend the science.
It was to delete the record.
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