On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, a former consultant to an expert in infectious diseases, entered a guilty plea to charges of conspiring to violate public records laws and hide official papers pertaining to grant research funding and the COVID-19 pandemic.
At a hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, David Morens, a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Fauci during the pandemic, entered his plea and opened a new tab to a conspiracy charge.
The 78-year-old was charged in April with a plot, according to the prosecution, to evade the agency’s requests for public information pertaining to COVID-19 research funding starting in April 2020.
On November 12, he will be sentenced to a maximum of five years in jail.
“Dr. Morens has accepted responsibility for his actions by entering a guilty plea today, and he will continue to do so,” his attorney Timothy Belevetz said in a statement.
The plea followed Fauci’s appearance before a Senate panel last month, during which he repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination and accused Republican Senator Rand Paul, a longtime opponent from Kentucky, of pursuing a “unhinged” campaign to have him imprisoned. Fauci led NIAID for 38 years and became the face of the U.S. pandemic response.
The origins of COVID are yet unknown. China said the FBI’s 2023 allegation that the pandemic was probably caused by a leak from a Wuhan laboratory had “no credibility whatsoever.” In January 2025, the CIA stated that a lab leak was plausible, albeit with “low confidence,” whereas the National Intelligence Council and four other U.S. intelligence organizations think the virus most likely spread naturally from an animal.
Morens’ plea, according to the prosecution, had to do with the National Institutes of Health’s decision to revoke a bat coronavirus research contract due to claims that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan facility. The business that got the grant had given a sub-award to the lab in China.
