OPINION:
The indictment of former senior National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases official David M. Morens is not just another Washington scandal (“Feds charge top Fauci aide with conspiracy to hide origins of COVID,” Web, April 28).
It marks the opening salvo in what must become a full-scale prosecutorial reckoning with the COVID-19 corruption that cost American lives and shattered public trust.
Mr. Morens, a top adviser to Anthony Fauci, is accused of conspiring to hide federal records, using his personal Gmail account to evade Freedom of Information Act requests and accepting illegal gratuities, all while pushing to restore funding for dangerous bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and silencing the lab-leak theory.
This was not incompetence. This was deliberate, and the Department of Justice must treat this case as the template for aggressive prosecutions across the entire COVID-19 corruption machine.
Early in the pandemic, cheap and safe repurposed drugs such as ivermectin were ridiculed, censored and blocked — not because the science was weak but likely because they threatened the multibillion-dollar emergency-use authorization for experimental mRNA shots.
Affordable, readily available drugs with solid track records would have threatened billions of dollars in experimental Big Pharma profits.
Doctors who prescribed ivermectin faced professional ruin. That was racketeering with human lives as collateral damage.
The reckless push of experimental mRNA shots on the entire population, including healthy young people and children, under the false banner of “safe and effective,” has now been exposed. The Food and Drug Administration’s recent warnings about myocarditis and other serious side effects confirm what many said years ago: The risks were downplayed and benefits exaggerated.
Equally disturbing was the deadly promotion of remdesivir. This drug, which had failed catastrophically in Ebola trials in Africa just a few years earlier, was forced on hospitalized patients. Hospitals received financial incentives to use it. The results were horrific.
Finally, there is the bat theory cover-up. Officials weaponized government money and influence to suppress the lab-leak theory while taxpayer dollars flowed to risky research in Wuhan. That is a betrayal of the highest order.
The time for congressional hearings is over. Prosecutions are the only way to restore accountability. The Justice Department must investigate any who suppressed ivermectin, profited from remdesivir, concealed the lab-leak evidence and/or knowingly exposed Americans to unnecessary risks.
DON BROWN
Charlotte, North Carolina
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