A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the National Institutes of Health from implementing steep cuts to how medical research grants are funded, after 22 states sued to stop the change.

The ruling by District Judge Angel Kelley, who was nominated by President Biden in 2021, halts the policy pending further court arguments from states and the Trump administration. A hearing is scheduled for Friday, Feb. 21. 

“As director of NIH, you did sign off on these so-called scientific experiments. And as a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting and evil. What you signed off on and these experiments that happened to beagles paid for by the American taxpayer. And I want you to know Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this.”

Old conspiracy theories never die. They just fade into the congressional record.

It should be bigger news that Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted that social-distancing guidelines — mandatory in many areas of the country during the pandemic, with non-compliant schools, businesses, and even churches shuttered — “sort of just appeared.” Likewise, there should have been a backlash after Fauci confessed that the public-health establishment misled the public about the efficacy of masking, and after he decided to use arbitrary “herd immunity” thresholds as a vehicle to manipulate the public into behaving in ways he found advantageous.

Today, Dr. Anthony Fauci is testifying on Capitol Hill for the first time since leaving public service. As the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and our nation prepares to hear from him, I felt called to share my experience working alongside him for years.

David Morens had a very bad day.

At the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, the longtime National Institutes of Health official encouraged colleagues to evade federal records requirements, claiming that shifting sensitive covid conversations to personal email and deleting messages would protect his high-profile former boss Anthony S. Fauci and others from unwanted scrutiny.

It was spectacularly bad — and wrong — advice. And it brought the wrath of Congress down on Morens yesterday.

The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 35-page memo presenting what they say is overwhelming evidence that David Morens, a top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19.  

The memo claims Morens unlawfully deleted emails and used a “secret back channel” to evade transparency.