Former ABC News correspondent says ‘hero’ Fauci linked to ‘heavy hand of censorship’ over COVID lab leak report

A former ABC News correspondent who once claimed during his network’s coverage of the coronavirus that “vaccines were proof of God’s love” for many Christians says the network significantly edited a story about the origin of COVID-19.

Terry Moran, 66, who spent more than two decades at ABC News, including stints as chief White House correspondent, “Nightline” co-anchor and, most recently, senior national correspondent and anchor for “ABC News Live,” claimed in an Aug. 14 episode of “The Fifth Column” podcast that he had “never been angrier” after the network and former NIAID Chief Anthony Fauci intervened in his investigation on competing theories about the origins of COVID-19, including the possibility that the virus had accidentally escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. 

Describing the episode as the only time at ABC News he felt “the heavy hand of censorship,” Moran said he initially started on the story around February 2021 in response to “smart and serious” colleagues who considered the lab leak theory a possibility.

“So I went to Nightline. I said, ‘Hey, you know, I’d like to do a story on …’ And they were like, ‘Great. Yeah, let’s do it.’ So, we just across the board, we talked to, you know, molecular virologists. We talked to people in the Trump administration, who had been in the Trump administration,” he said.

Moran added that his team “broke a little news that the lab had been funded by the Chinese military” from a tip that came from “inside one of the three letter agencies” in the U.S. government.

And at the end of the day, my own personal feeling was, you know, talking to everybody, I thought it’s probably a little bit more likely it’s natural,” he added. “But if you told me it had leaked from the lab, fine. And it’s probably not cooked up. It’s probably not a ‘franken-virus.’ 

“And at the end of the day, my own personal feeling was, you know, talking to everybody, I thought it’s probably a little bit more likely it’s natural,” he added. “But if you told me it had leaked from the lab, fine. And it’s probably not cooked up. It’s probably not a ‘franken-virus.'”

“But I didn’t reach that conclusion. I just laid it out and we’re ready to go.”

On the day the report was set to air, Moran said the report was altered following a review by ABC News’ legal and standards teams and, said Moran, Fauci himself.

“The day that it’s supposed to air, it gets reviewed and it comes back to me and it is incomprehensible. I’d never been angrier,” he said, adding that the decision came from “the lawyers, standards and I was told Fauci.”

When asked during the podcast whether the story had been sent to Fauci, Moran said he did not personally know whether that had happened, but that he was told that the script was provided to him.

“It would have been the script,” Moran said. “That’s what I was told. I don’t know that that’s true personally, but I was told that.”

Moran said the revised version contained so many qualifications that he no longer considered it his story.

“I’ve never watched that story and never want to because it wasn’t mine,” he said. “… It was incomprehensible. They had put so many caveats in there … it was so legalized.”

Despite the network’s pushback on his report, Moran said he believes Fauci is a “hero” who simply was “a public servant doing his best.”

“The demonization of Fauci is wrong,” he asserted. “I think he was a public servant doing his best. He had done his best. … He’s had a long career as a public servant. I have no hard feelings against him.”

Moran also pointed to what he described as a broader, organized campaign to suppress the lab-leak theory. He said one of the researchers who had funded the Wuhan lab’s work worked “to get scientists to sign on and say, ‘There’s no way there’s a lab leak,'” while casting anyone who suggested otherwise as “participating in racism or something.” Moran said those racism accusations “really silenced” the network’s coverage.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Moran called ABC News a “hothouse of Leftist ideology” that lacks “viewpoint diversity,” and acknowledged some hesitation about discussing the episode publicly, telling the hosts, “I probably shouldn’t have.”

The Christian Post reached out to ABC News for comment on Monday. 

Moran was suspended and later fired from ABC News in June 2025 after a now-deleted social media post on X in which he sharply criticized President Donald Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller as “world-class haters.”

Prior to leaving the network, Moran played an integral role in ABC News’ coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. 

In a March 2021 interview with then-President Joe Biden, Moran highlighted the Biden administration’s vaccination campaign and characterized the achievement of reaching 100 million doses as an accomplishment. He also explicitly credited the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government initiative which “got the ball rolling” on the expedited rollout of the vaccines.

That same month, Moran reported on the role of church leaders in vaccination efforts, including those who were “preaching the Gospel both for and against taking the COVID-19 vaccine. In that segment, Moran pushed back against Pastor Tony Spell’s stance for opposing the injections over the use of “stem cells from abortions.”

Moran also stated in that report that for Evangelical leaders such as Franklin Graham and others, ‘vaccines are proof of God’s love.”

Last month, Fauci came under renewed criticism for his newly-released pandemic-era diary entries ahead of a tense hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. During the hearing, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times.