Terry Moran, a veteran ABC News correspondent who left the network in 2025, alleges his 2021 report on COVID's possible lab origins was rendered "incomprehensible" after the script was routed through Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Moran laid out the accusation in an interview with "The Fifth Column" podcast, describing a day-of-air review that stripped his roughly 15-minute "Nightline" segment of its editorial spine and buried it under legal hedging. The two-part piece, which aired in June 2021, had examined whether COVID might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a question that multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and Department of Energy, have since assessed as the most likely explanation for the pandemic's origin.
Moran told the podcast hosts he began pursuing the story in early 2021 after noticing "smart and serious" people raising the lab-leak possibility online. ABC's "Nightline" gave him the green light. He interviewed scientists and Trump administration officials, and he spoke with Jamie Metzl, then a member of a World Health Organization committee on human genome editing, who had been outspoken about a potential leak from the Wuhan lab.
The trouble, Moran said, came on the day the segment was set to air. After the script went through its final review, it came back unrecognizable. When co-host Michael Moynihan asked who had reviewed it, Moran answered bluntly:
"Lawyers, standards and, I was told, Fauci."
Co-host Moynihan pressed: had ABC sent a copy of the transcript or the video to Anthony Fauci? Moran said he believed it was the script, then added a caveat of his own.
"It would've been the script, that's what I was told. I don't know if that's true personally, but I was told that."
Moran described his reaction in the booth that day in stark terms:
"And I said, 'I can't do this.' And they're going to air and it's a 15-minute piece or whatever. And I'm cursing and screaming in the booth."
He went further, saying the experience left him furious, and that he has never watched the version ABC broadcast.
"And I am just absolutely livid, beside myself. And I'm usually, I try to be a good colleague that way. It's important to be respectful of somebody on the other end of that mic taking it in in New York and the editor... I have never watched that story and never want to, because it wasn't mine, I didn't think, and most importantly because it was incomprehensible. They had put so many caveats in there, and it was so legalized."
Even before the last-minute overhaul, the segment had structural problems that cut against Moran's reporting. Metzl, the WHO committee member who supported investigating the lab-leak hypothesis, was outnumbered on screen by medical experts who rejected the theory. Two ABC News journalists, medical unit producer Sony Salzman and investigative reporter Sasha Pezenik, appeared in the segment and, as described in the reporting, poured cold water on the lab-leak possibility.
Moran himself acknowledged he did not go into the story as a lab-leak absolutist. He told the podcast his personal assessment at the time leaned slightly toward a natural origin.
"And at the end of the day, my own personal feeling was, you know, it's probably a little bit more likely it's natural. But if you told me it had leaked from the lab, fine. It's probably not cooked up. It's probably not a 'Frankenvirus.'"
But the reporting itself had turned up material worth airing. Moran said the team had broken news that the Wuhan lab had received funding from the Chinese military, despite denials from Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, widely known as the "Bat Lady."
"We broke a little news that that lab had been funded by the Chinese military, despite the 'Bat Lady' [Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli] saying no, it hadn't... And we kind of laid it out."
Moran's account lands at a moment when Fauci faces mounting scrutiny from Congress and from his own written record. Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, published entries from Fauci's personal diary that revealed what Fox News Digital described as behind-the-scenes relationships between the former NIAID director and prominent media figures, including CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell, and ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
The diary also reportedly showed that Fauci's private thoughts about COVID contradicted some of his public statements on public health guidelines. The specifics of those contradictions were not detailed in the reporting, but the broader picture, a top public health official maintaining close, undisclosed contact with the journalists covering him, fits squarely with Moran's allegation that ABC routed editorial copy through Fauci before broadcast.
Fauci did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. Neither did ABC News or Moran himself.
Fauci's legal exposure has deepened in recent weeks. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a Senate hearing last month, according to the reporting, and accused Sen. Paul of leading a crusade to imprison him. Senate Republicans on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee responded by voting to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress and referring the matter to the Department of Justice for criminal review.
That sequence, the diary, the Fifth Amendment invocations, the contempt vote, and now a former ABC correspondent alleging that his own network let Fauci vet a story about Fauci's conduct, forms a picture of an official who enjoyed extraordinary access to the institutions that were supposed to hold him accountable.
Moran, for his part, did not frame himself as a crusader. He told the podcast he opposed the "demonization" of Fauci. But his account of what happened inside ABC's editorial process in June 2021 raises a straightforward question: if a network's own correspondent cannot air a factual report on a matter of global public health without the subject of that report getting a look at the script first, who exactly is the editorial process protecting?
When the institutions that exist to ask hard questions start clearing their copy with the people who need to answer them, accountability does not just erode. It disappears.
