The Public’s Business Ought to be Public

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Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Jason Foster

Newsweek

Last November my organization, Empower Oversight, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around half a dozen other entities have also been forced to go to court to compel the NIH to make pandemic documents public.

It’s worth noting that this didn’t need to happen. Good lawyers charge hundreds of dollars an hour or more and hiring legal talent to pursue cases full time is not easy. By forcing public interest groups to spend this money on litigation before complying with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the NIH is locking out the vast majority of Americans from accessing federal records. It takes financial resources to most effectively probe how our government operates.

Only after suing NIH did we receive any documents. In March, we released hundreds of emails in a report about the NIH deleting the sequences of viruses from a database they operate. These viruses are closely related to the COVID-19 virus. Experts say that analyzing them may help us understand how the pandemic began.

Four email exchanges stood out. First, emails show that the NIH appears to have misled reporters about why those sequences were deleted from public view and steered journalists away from a New York Times story, toward more favorable coverage in the Washington Post.

Second, NIH officials told the public that the pandemic most likely began when an infected animal sickened a human in a market in Wuhan, China. But we found an email with prominent scientists advising NIH that the sequences at the heart of the controversy suggested that explanation was less likely.

Third, we found that NIH Director Francis Collins was reviewing and clearing FOIA requests from reporters, an odd use of time by the director of a public health agency in the midst of a pandemic.

Fourth, a virologist asked the NIH to analyze the deleted sequences of viruses closely related to COVID-19, of which it retains copies for “preservation purposes.” But the NIH refused to cooperate. A few days after we released our report, Vanity Fair confirmed and expanded on our findings. It reported on many of the same emails we released, including several describing a Sunday afternoon Zoom call with outside experts, Collins and Anthony Fauci—the NIH official most prominently associated our country’s pandemic response. The weekend Zoom call came just as information about NIH’s removal of sequences at the request of a Wuhan researcher was about to become public.

In the last 18 months, two news organizations have taken the NIH to court, where judges forced the agency to release public documents. In early June, Buzzfeed published emails sent and received by Dr. Fauci, who is now chief medical adviser to the president. The public has a right to understand how the government handled a pandemic that has killed so many Americans, but the agency only made the documents public after Buzzfeed sued.

The same thing happened again with The Intercept, a fiercely independent news site which has published blockbuster stories in recent months about the NIH’s funding of research by the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that collaborates with and funds the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Last September, The Intercept published 900 pages of internal NIH documents related to U.S. government financing of research at the WIV. Among those hundreds of pages, the reporters found new evidence that the NIH was funding research many scientists describe as “gain of function,” a type of study that involves making viruses more dangerous.
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3 thoughts on “The Public’s Business Ought to be Public”

  1. Reblogged this on What is gang stalking? Who are the gang stalkers? All gang stalking is current and former police, military and intelligence agents in the community policing scheme, turning democracies into police states, all across the western world. http://www.resarchorganizedgangstalking.org, http://gangstalkingresearch.com and http://www.gangstalkingresearch.wordpress.com are one and the same site and commented:
    The Plandemic is being outed as a plot by globalists at every level–otherwise, why stall, and obfuscate–and even then, hide facts?

    The west is no longer a democratic enterprise where citizens have rights to the most basic “things” of democracy–things like access to facts from our own government agencies.

    Things like full disclosure from government bodies, police institutions, the nefarious and opaque “Fusion Centers,” and even the things about our public health–the NIH has steadfastly stood in the way of major media, accesing facts.

    Read Newsweek’:

    “Last November my organization, Empower Oversight, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around half a dozen other entities have also been forced to go to court to compel the NIH to make pandemic documents public.”

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  2. Pingback: Public Backlash Against Bovaer-Laced Milk and Meat | Worldtruth

  3. Pingback: Former NIH Director Francis Collins Abruptly Retires After Involvement with Gain-of-Function Wuhan Research Revealed | Worldtruth

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