The prosecution of Dr. David Morens on charges of blocking investigations into COVID’s origins can’t be the end of the nation’s search for truth in this affair: Even if the 11th-hour Biden pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci keeps him out of prison, Americans need the full facts.

Morens worked under Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; he stands charged with destroying and concealing official records on the bug’s birth — in an evident effort to protect his boss.

Plenty of evidence shows Fauci conspired with National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins to quash any inquiry into COVID’s origins within the Wuhan Institute of Virology — which did NIH/NIAISD-funded research into coronaviruses in the years before the pandemic, despite the federal ban on such “gain of function” experiments. 

Emails show Moren bragging of his coverups despite the Freedom of Information Act: “[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts”; “There is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house.”

All this helped conceal Fauci’s ongoing coordination with Peter Daszak — the chief of the EcoHealth Alliance, the outfit Fauci directed grants for that gain-of-function research at WIV.

That work specifically aimed to manipulate coronaviruses at the “furin cleavage site” — the crucial mutation that practically fingerprints the COVID virus. 

This is almost certainly why Fauci & Co. ran their con game around insisting the virus had a natural origin: If the then-locked-down public learned US officials had funded reckless scientists possibly creating the pandemic bug at a poorly-secured overseas lab, those officials could face prison for life.

Especially when the Fauci crew also endorsed the policies that closed schools, ruined businesses and forced loved ones to die alone in hospitals.

The CIA, FBI and the Department of Energy’s renowned Livermore Labs all now view COVID-19 as most likely man-made.

While we — thanks in large part to Fauci & co. — can never be 100% sure of that, the balance of probabilities lies strongly against the natural-origin theory. 

Fauci, Collins, and Morens lied to conceal this fact.

The media took up their lies and declared them canon; so too did countless law- and policymakers. 

Morens faces more than five decades if convicted on all charges, yet he’s clearly a little fish compared to Fauci, who repeatedly played word games to deny his involvement in funding gain-of-function research, brazenly lying to Congress and conspired with Collins to use their power to bully researchers into endorsing the natural-origin theory.

He demonized anyone daring to criticize him, on this or any other issue, as attacking science itself — and created the atmosphere in which any dissent from or even curiosity about the natural-origin theory was swiftly punished by public opprobrium.

Or, in the case of this newspaper, naked censorship via an unholy collaboration between Big Tech and Big Government.

Fauci’s pardon means he can’t plead the 5th if called to testify before Congress on all this — and if he doesn’t come clean, it won’t protect him from perjury charges; the House and Senate should be requiring him to answer publicly now.

He should also lose his hefty government pension: This already vastly wealthy (after a lifetime in public service, hmm) man doesn’t deserve a single dime more from the taxpayers he lied to.

Nor can this be the end of the search for truth and justice: The public also needs to learn the full facts on the Biden administration’s campaigns to conceal vaccine risks and otherwise politicize the nation’s COVID response.

Force testimony from Randi Weingarten and the health officials she worked with to keep the nation’s schools closed, too.

Epic COVID-era abuses of federal power have rightly brought public trust in science and government to epic lows; the only way to repair that damage is to uncover all the rocks and bathe the squirming bugs beneath them in the brightest possible sunlight.