A U.S. senator and his team say they have uncovered additional evidence that federal officials worked to evade requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Several emails obtained by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) showed personnel with the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were aware of FOIA requests and sought to evade them. FOIA enables people to request records from the government. It requires officials to retain and produce requested records, subject to certain exemptions.
In a Nov. 26, 2022, missive, Allison Lale, a medical officer with the CDC, asked a colleague about receiving safety analyses of COVID-19 vaccination from the FDA.
Pedro Moro, a CDC epidemiologist, responded. “I think that because of the FOIAs we may have asked FDA to stop sending these weekly data mining outputs,” Moro wrote.
“Oh interesting,” Lale said. She added that during calls for a CDC-managed program, “we used to just verbally mention” that certain terms had not triggered safety signals, or signs vaccines were causing problems.
“But we could also leave it out if that [sic] this creates more hassle,” she added.
In a separate email chain, FDA officials were told by an FDA vaccine safety analytic expert, Dr. Ana Szarfman, that the approach they were using to analyze the safety of COVID-19 vaccines was faulty. The information sparked a long discussion, during which officials considered asking the expert to contact an outside expert on the matter.
“Before we potentially reach out to Ana, we should meet internally – many considerations not suited to email…” David Menschik, an FDA official who distributed the data mining reports, wrote on April 15, 2021.
“Sounds good,” Bethany Baer, another FDA worker, responded. “Happy to meet and discuss anytime open on my calendar.”
Johnson, the chairman of the House Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said during an April 29 hearing that the emails served as “additional evidence of how federal officials avoided creating a paper trail to prevent transparency and public disclosure.”
A top CDC official’s emails were missing, the government told Johnson in 2025.
A grand jury charged Dr. David Morens, a former official with the National Institutes of Health, a component of the Department of Health and Human Services, this week with conspiring to destroy some records and conceal others, after he allegedly wrote, in missives obtained by journalists and Johnson, that said he wanted to use a personal email address to evade FOIA.
In one email cited by prosecutors, Morens said in 2020 that he wanted to “keep this correspondnce [sic] off of USG emails for obvious reasons, so am sending from gmail.” He added later, “I am under Multiple FOIAs already.”
In another, a co-conspirator told Morens that he was using Morens’s Gmail address “to keep you out of the FoIA target.”
The National Institutes of Health declined to provide a comment on the charges.
Despite efforts to conceal, the subcommittee acquired the emails he just released thanks to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s responsiveness to subpoenas, Johnson said.
Neither the CDC nor the FDA, nor their parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, responded to requests for comment by the time of publication.
Lale, Moro, Baer, and Menschik still work for the government. Lale, Moro, and Baer did not return inquiries by publication time. A query to Menschik returned an automated message saying he is on extended leave.