Christian Smith
(NewsNation) – The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 35-page memo outlining what they say are irrefutable evidence that David Morens, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s top advisor at the National Institutes of Health, deleted records essential to uncovering the origins of COVID-19.
The memo states that Morens illegally deleted emails and used a “covert channel” to avoid transparency.
“(I) learned from our FOIA [sic] Madam, here, how do I make emails disappear after I receive the FOIA (sic) but before research begins,” Morens wrote in a February 24, 2021 email, which was obtained by The New York Post. “Also, I deleted most of the previous emails after sending them to Gmail (sic).”
Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., and former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield joined NewsNation host Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night to discuss the memo’s claims.
“What we uncovered is basically a cover-up of immense proportions where people avoided FOIA investigations,” said McCormick, who was an emergency room doctor during the height of the pandemic. “There’s going to be hell to pay when we really get to the bottom of this, and I think we’re getting close.”
Redfield said on “CUOMO” that “The problem is that it has finally been admitted that there are a lot of COVID viruses that this lab (in Wuhan) has that have never seen the light of day, so we don’t know the inventory.”
Is COVID-19 still a ‘pandemic?’
On March 11, 2020, the director general of the World Health Organization told the world that COVID-19 “can be characterized as a pandemic.”
At the time, fewer than 4,500 people were thought to have died from the virus, but it was spreading rapidly, appearing in new cities and countries every day.
Fast forward to 2024, the virus has taken a it is estimated that 7 million lives. It’s still changing and triggering new variants, sickening thousands of people and ultimately killing hundreds every day. But we also have many more tools than we did in 2020. We have several effective vaccines and antiviral treatments to help fight the disease.
With all this in mind, is COVID-19 still considered a pandemic-level threat?
A WHO spokesperson told Nexstar that “the word ‘pandemic’ is not binary, it is not on or off.” To make matters even more complicated, there is no universally agreed upon definition of a pandemic.
from Colombia Mailman School of Public Health says a pandemic begins when a disease spreads exponentially and across international borders: “This broad geographic reach is what causes pandemics to lead to large-scale social disruptions, economic losses and general hardship.”
On the other hand, a disease is endemic when it is “consistently present, but limited to a certain region”.
With COVID-19, it has been “consistently present” for years, but it is not limited to any specific area or population. It still has “broad geographic reach,” but the number of cases is not exploding out of control.
The WHO will not decide when the pandemic will “end,” a spokesperson told Nexstar. However, they declared the end of the Public Health Emergency of International Concern in May 2023. Unlike the term “pandemic”, a public health emergency is clearly defined in international health regulations.
While the WHO has not determined whether COVID-19 still constitutes a pandemic, the agency has made clear that the virus “remains a threat to global health.”
Alix Martichoux and “The Hill” contributed to this report.
