Newly disclosed NIH emails show Anthony Fauci instructed an aide in 2012 to permanently delete an exchange concerning criticism of federally funded gain-of-function research, adding to congressional scrutiny over whether he improperly destroyed government records.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Newly disclosed emails from Anthony Fauci’s tenure at the National Institutes of Health show that he instructed a subordinate in 2012 to delete an email and then remove it from the deleted folder amid an escalating dispute over controversial experiments that made an avian influenza virus transmissible through the air.
“Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file,” Fauci wrote from his NIH email account, according to documents reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The exchange concerned New York Times science writer Phil Boffey, who had been warning publicly that experiments involving laboratory-modified pandemic viruses posed potentially catastrophic risks and could damage the NIH’s reputation.
The newly surfaced correspondence adds to previously disclosed evidence cited by Sen. Rand Paul concerning Fauci’s handling of federal communications.
Fauci testified under oath in 2024 that he had never destroyed official records. Federal law prohibits the unlawful concealment, removal, mutilation, obliteration or destruction of certain government records, although whether any particular communication falls within those provisions depends on the applicable federal recordkeeping requirements and circumstances. The relevant federal statute is 18 U.S.C. § 2071.
Fauci did not respond to a request for comment.
The 2012 emails emerged from one of the earliest major public controversies surrounding gain-of-function research, years before the COVID-19 pandemic renewed international scrutiny of laboratory experiments involving potentially dangerous pathogens.
In 2011, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier and his research team modified an H5N1 avian influenza virus in experiments that resulted in airborne transmission among ferrets.
The natural H5N1 virus had an estimated fatality rate of approximately 50% among confirmed human cases, and Fouchier himself described the laboratory-created virus as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”
The research received funding through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci led at the time.
The experiments triggered an immediate debate over whether creating viruses with enhanced transmissibility could help scientists prepare for naturally emerging pandemics or instead create unacceptable risks of laboratory accidents or deliberate misuse.
Fauci publicly defended the research.
In a December 2011 Washington Post opinion article, Fauci, then-NIH Director Francis Collins and Gary Nabel of the NIAID Vaccine Research Center argued that studying potentially dangerous viruses could help public health authorities and pharmaceutical companies prepare for similar pathogens if they arose naturally.
Fauci described the work as a “risk worth taking.”
The New York Times responded the following month with an un-bylined editorial warning of potentially catastrophic consequences.
The newly disclosed correspondence identifies Boffey as the apparent author of the January 2012 piece, “An Engineered Doomsday”.
The article argued that the NIH had financed research capable of producing an “engineered doomsday” and warned that an accident involving the modified virus could kill “hundreds of millions of people.”
“The consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk,” Boffey wrote, apparently responding directly to Fauci’s argument that the benefits justified the danger.
Two months later, Boffey returned to the controversy with another New York Times column.
His March 2012 article, “The Truth About the Doomsday Virus?”, questioned subsequent assurances from Fouchier about the lethality of the laboratory-modified virus.
Fouchier had softened some of his earlier descriptions as criticism of the work intensified.
Boffey noted, however, that scientists who had reviewed the original description of the experiment said it indicated that the airborne form remained as lethal as the naturally occurring virus.
One portion of the article particularly concerned Fauci because it suggested the NIH had a reputational interest in persuading federal biosecurity advisers to permit publication of the research.
“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,” Boffey wrote.
Fauci reacted privately in emails.
“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 expressed his frustration more candidly in an email to a subordinate.
“Clearly, people are getting to Phil Boffey and he is swallowing it,” Fauci wrote.
That exchange was followed by the deletion instruction.
“Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file,” Fauci wrote.
At the time, Fauci was also pushing against a recommendation from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity that sensitive methodological details from Fouchier’s experiment not be published.
Fauci warned that if the board maintained its position, “the field of research on influenza … has a serious problem.”
The biosecurity panel eventually reversed course, and the Fouchier research was published in full.
Neither Boffey nor Fouchier responded to requests for comment about the newly disclosed material.
The deletion email has taken on additional significance because it is not the only instance in which Fauci has been accused of directing the destruction of government communications.
Paul, R-Ky., previously identified two additional examples involving communications from 2020 in which Fauci allegedly sought to have official records deleted.
Those disclosures have become part of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigation into Fauci’s recordkeeping practices and his testimony before Congress.
The historical controversy surrounding Fouchier’s influenza research later intersected with the debate over the origins of COVID-19.
After SARS-CoV-2 emerged in late 2019 and spread globally in 2020, Fouchier participated in discussions with Fauci and other virologists concerning whether the virus might have originated through a laboratory accident.
Fouchier helped formulate an important argument incorporated into “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, an influential paper that argued the available evidence did not support laboratory manipulation as the origin of the pandemic virus.
Fauci repeatedly cited the paper and its authors publicly in subsequent years.
Later-disclosed records showed that Fauci had communicated with scientists involved in the origins discussion before publication, interactions that were not publicly disclosed when he cited the paper and have since been detailed in records reconstructing the development of the Proximal Origin paper.
Private communications among scientists involved in that debate also show concerns about Fouchier’s own interests in the outcome.
One of the paper’s authors described Fouchier privately as “unbelievably conflicted.”
“Ron … is not going to want it to be a GOF [gain-of-function] escape,” one author wrote.
Fouchier himself argued against giving substantial attention to a laboratory-origin scenario in the paper, expressing concern that doing so could renew controversy over high-risk virology experiments and lead to what he called “harm to science”.
“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 newly disclosed 2012 exchange does not establish the origin of COVID-19, nor does it by itself determine whether Fauci violated federal records law.
It does, however, provide another documented example of Fauci explicitly instructing someone using NIH communications to delete an email and then remove it from the deleted folder — an instruction now being examined alongside his later sworn testimony that he did not destroy government records.
The episode also shows that more than seven years before SARS-CoV-2 emerged, senior scientists and journalists were already debating many of the same questions that would later dominate the COVID-19 origins controversy: whether experiments designed to enhance dangerous viruses offered sufficient scientific benefit to justify the risks, whether detailed findings should be published and how concerns about institutional reputation and future research influenced those decisions.
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