ABC’s Terry Moran Finally Confessed Who Killed His COVID Lab Leak Story

For years the media insisted anyone who mentioned a Wuhan lab leak was spreading dangerous misinformation. This week a former ABC insider admitted his own network gutted his COVID story right before air. He says he knows exactly whose name got his reporting quietly rewritten.

Moran Says His Lab Leak Report Came Back Incomprehensible The Day It Was Set To Air

Terry Moran spent years inside ABC News, most recently as a senior national correspondent before he left the network in 2025.

On "The Fifth Column" podcast last week, he described a story from early 2021 that never should have been controversial.

Moran pitched Nightline on a report examining whether COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

His team found the lab had received Chinese military funding – something the lab's own "Bat Lady," virologist Shi Zhengli, had publicly denied.

Nightline's producers loved the pitch and green-lit it.

Then came the day it was supposed to air.

"It gets reviewed, and it comes back to me, and it is incomprehensible," Moran said.

He said he had never been angrier in his career, cursing in the editing booth as lawyers and standards executives stripped the piece of anything resembling a real conclusion.

When a podcast host asked who was involved in that review, Moran didn't hesitate.

"Lawyers, standards and, I was told, Fauci," he said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci – the same government scientist who spent 2021 assuring the country the lab leak theory was a fringe conspiracy – had a hand in defanging a legitimate news investigation before a single American ever saw it.

Sound Familiar? This Isn't The First Time A Story Got Buried Right Before It Mattered

Moran's account is its own story, and nobody has produced evidence it was coordinated with what happened next – but the resemblance is hard to ignore.

Months later, Twitter blocked users from even sharing the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop.

The House Judiciary Committee later found the FBI had met with tech platforms more than 30 times before that story broke, and that agents already knew the laptop wasn't Russian disinformation when they let social media companies treat it like poison anyway.

Facebook executives privately discussed calibrating their censorship to please an incoming administration, according to the committee's findings.

Different networks, different platforms, same instinct – bury the story first and let the public sort out the truth years later.

Moran's account just gives Americans one more example to add to that list.

Fauci Has A Documented History Of Managing The Media Narrative

This isn't the first sign that Fauci treated network reporters as an extension of his own communications shop.

Sen. Rand Paul has spent months publicizing entries from Fauci's own diary showing he fed questions to friendly journalists and built friendships with the same anchors covering him, including CNN's Jake Tapper, NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

Senate Republicans on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress this month after he pleaded the Fifth 111 times during a hearing last month.

A man who won't answer basic questions under oath had, according to Moran, enough sway at a major network to get an inconvenient story killed before it aired.

Fauci and ABC News still haven't answered for it – when reporters asked the network and the retired doctor to respond to Moran's account this week, both went silent.

Why This Story Should Make Every American Furious

Think about what actually happened here.

A working journalist did his job, found real evidence, and had it taken away from him by lawyers acting on behalf of a bureaucrat who never faced voters.

That's not journalism protecting the public from misinformation.

That's a bureaucrat deciding what Americans got to know, years before he'd plead the Fifth rather than explain himself to Congress.

Moran still says he holds "no hard feelings" toward Fauci, which tells you everything about how far the legacy media will go to protect one of its own even after admitting he censored them.

The rest of us don't have that luxury – we're the ones who lost years living with a story that could have set the record straight.

Sources:

• "Terry Moran claims ABC overhauled COVID lab leak report reviewed by Fauci," Fox News, August 15, 2026.
• "Ex-ABC News correspondent claims network overhauled his COVID lab leak report after sending copy to Fauci," Yahoo News, August 15, 2026.
• Mike LaChance, "A Genuine Scandal: Former ABC News Journalist Terry Moran Claims 2021 Story About COVID Being a Lab Leak Was Spiked by Anthony Fauci," The Gateway Pundit, August 16, 2026.
• "Testimony Reveals FBI Employees Who Warned Social Media Companies about Hack and Leak Operation Knew Hunter Biden Laptop Wasn't Russian Disinformation," House Judiciary Committee, September 27, 2024.
• Marc A. Thiessen, "The Suppression of Hunter Biden's Laptop Is a Huge Scandal," American Enterprise Institute, August 22, 2023.