Credit where it’s due: this one belongs to Catherine Herridge, whose independent reporting broke it, working from records Senator Chuck Grassley obtained from HHS.
Here is the first line of a message sent on August 8, 2021 by Michael Osterholm — Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, and a member of Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board — addressed to “Jeff, Vivek, Tony and Rochelle”:
“I’m sending this via text messaging to avoid any FOIA issues.”
That is the opening sentence. The stated purpose of the channel, written down in the channel itself.
The recipients, per Herridge’s reporting: Jeff Zients, then the White House COVID coordinator and later Biden’s chief of staff. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General. Anthony Fauci — confirmed. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director.
That is the entire command structure of the American pandemic response, receiving a message whose author announced in his first line that he was routing it around the federal records law.
What he had to say that was worth hiding
Read the rest and the choice of channel starts to look less like habit and more like judgment.
Osterholm tells them he has been consistent since April 2020 about “the limited benefit that cloth face coverings play in reducing risk.” He tells them N95s are what actually work against aerosol transmission. And then he says this about the agency one of his recipients was running:
“none of the studies that CDC uses to support its statement as to the significant protection of face cloth coverings stand up to scientific scrutiny.”
He adds that CDC “was very late to the game recognizing that aerosols play a significant role in the transmission picture.”
He closes by predicting what history will conclude:
“I am certain one day that one of the take-away findings of this pandemic was the constant USG emphasis on masking while at the same time providing minimal guidance to the public what effective masking means.”
Be precise about what Osterholm was arguing, because it matters and because getting it wrong would be the easy way to lose this. He was not against masking. He says plainly, “I am all for ‘masking’ but we must be promoting the use of N-95s.” His complaint is that the government was telling Americans to do a thing he did not believe worked, instead of the thing he did.
That distinction doesn’t soften the story. It sharpens it. The dispute inside the room was never whether cloth face coverings did much. It was what to say in public about it.
And note the trigger. A Newsmax reporter had asked Jen Psaki about Osterholm’s own comments on cloth masks. His response was to reassure the task force — over a channel he’d chosen to defeat FOIA — that the reporter had mischaracterized him, while restating the substance of exactly what the reporter had reported.
He said it in public too. We wrote it down at the time.
None of the science here was secret. Osterholm’s views were on the record, and this newsletter covered them as they happened.
In February 2021 we wrote up Expert versus Expert — Osterholm, then a top health adviser to the incoming president, flatly contradicting Fauci’s double-masking recommendation: “I do not support the idea of two masks.” He explained that what matters is fit and filtration, comparing the seal to swimming goggles.
In October 2021 we ran The most important 5 mins you can spend today, on Osterholm going on CNN and dismantling the claim that masks had eliminated the flu.
So the record is not that a lone dissenter was ignored. It is that the man saying cloth masks don’t do much was inside the tent, said so publicly, said so privately to the four people running the response — and the guidance did not change.
And then they masked the children anyway
Here is the part that should end careers.
August 8, 2021 was three weeks before the school year. Over the following months, districts across the country mandated cloth face coverings on children — including preschoolers — and in many places kept them there deep into 2022.
The people issuing and defending that guidance had in hand, in writing, from one of their own advisers: cloth coverings offer very limited protection, and the CDC’s own supporting studies do not withstand scrutiny.
We said so at the time, repeatedly, and were treated as cranks for it:
Masking Children is an Ineffective Policy and Not Supported by Research — September 2021, weeks after this text was sent
Infographic: Making Children Mask is Misguided Health Policy — January 2022
Mask Mandates and Trauma — December 2021
Masking Children is Insane and Harmful — July 2022
Debunking the Mask Mandate: A Systematic Review of COVID-19 Child Masking — December 2023
New Study! Masking Kids → Unproven Benefits & Potential Harms — October 2024
Even the CDC eventually conceded the product was inadequate — we covered that in CDC: Ditch that Cloth Mask! in January 2022, five months after Osterholm’s text.
And there’s a wrinkle nobody in that group text addressed. Osterholm’s answer was N95s. N95s are not a serious option for small children — they are not fit-tested for them, and the respirators that work for an industrial hygienist do not work for a four-year-old. Which means the honest conclusion available to those four officials in August 2021 was that for young children there was no effective masking option on the table at all.
They did not tell parents that. They mandated the thing their own adviser said didn’t work.
Two days ago we published what that decision may have cost: speech-language IEPs at the highest rate ever recorded, and the states that masked longest carrying the most young children in special education, with the backlog and lost-classroom-time explanations both tested and both failing.
The Morens plea, two days earlier
The timing here is not a coincidence so much as a pattern coming due.
On August 18, 2026 — one day before Herridge published — David Morens, senior adviser in the NIAID Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022 and Fauci’s longtime lieutenant, pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy relating to a scheme to evade the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act.
Per the Justice Department, Morens conspired with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance — identified in the plea as “Co-Conspirator 1” — to destroy or conceal records after NIH terminated EcoHealth’s bat coronavirus grant. Four other felony counts were dropped as part of the deal. He faces up to five years and a $250,000 fine, with sentencing set for November 12, 2026 before Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Herridge notes the statute that makes this more than an ethics problem: 18 U.S.C. § 2071 makes it a crime to willfully conceal, remove, or destroy federal records.
So assemble the sequence:
February 2020 — Fauci to NIH Director Francis Collins: please delete this e-mail after you read it. August 2021 — Osterholm to the four most senior officials in the response: I’m sending this via text messaging to avoid any FOIA issues. 2021–22 — Morens, later by his own guilty plea, conspiring to keep records out of FOIA.
Three different people. Three different agencies and roles. The same instinct, expressed in nearly the same words.
That is not a few bad actors. That is a working culture, in which the reflex on encountering a fact the public might not like was to make sure the public could not obtain the record of it.
The question Herridge asks, which is the right one
Her post ends where the story now has to go:
How widespread, and how many separate channels were used to avoid FOIA?
We know of at least three now, across three organizations, spanning at least two administrations. Every one surfaced by accident — through a subpoena, a lawsuit, a criminal referral, or a senator with jurisdiction and patience.
None of it surfaced because the system worked. It surfaced because the system was forced.
Which raises the obvious question about everything that was never subpoenaed, never litigated, and never referred.
Reporting by Catherine Herridge, August 19, 2026, from records obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley via HHS. Osterholm message dated August 8, 2021. Morens plea reported August 18, 2026; details from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland. Prior RationalGround coverage linked throughout.
One of these evil treasonous genocidal traders from Fauci on down needs to be arrested, tried for crimes against humanity and hung by the neck until dead.
Regards
I might dispute the viability of N95s for widespread use too, but that is probably a horse already tenderized enough at this point. For sure, wearing a mask more suitable for robbing a stagecoach NEVER made any sense. At the risk of repeating myself without supplying sufficient context, I went to the CDC website very early on, specifically looking for studies in support of masking. I followed those links and read those studies. What I found was quite bit short of the bar of "survives scientific scrutiny."