What Anthony Fauci’s diary reveals about COVID

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) has released entries from the diary of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and you’ll never guess what the ex-coronavirus advisor actually wrote about the origins of COVID-19. Paul has revealed there’s a massive gap between what Fauci said in public and what he said in private about the likely start of the pandemic.

At the start of the pandemic, on January 26th, 2020, Fauci wrote that he did not think the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China,  was where COVID jumped from animals to humans. He wrote: “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.” He cited other cases that he thought demonstrated COVID was circulating in the population in China prior to that.

So maybe Fauci changed his mind later? OK. But here’s where things get interesting. Just one week later, Fauci convened a call with a bunch of other virologists. There were 12 scientists on that call. According to Fauci’s diary, only two of the scientists were convinced that COVID had arisen naturally from animal spillover. The rest of them “felt that deliberate insertion was possible”—i.e., that the virus was engineered in a lab. That conclusion, however, was inconvenient for Fauci because he had served for decades as the foremost public advocate of gain-of-function research—of experimenting on coronaviruses so that they become more transmissible and more deadly.

After the call, several of those scientists got to work on a paper titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”. Published in March 2020, it concluded that the evidence favored a natural origin. We already know that Fauci pushed the authors to reach a stronger conclusion than they were comfortable with. But now we also know that behind the scenes, Fauci was well aware of the scientists’ skepticism, and he himself had written that he also doubted the market as the spillover event.

Taken together, these details prove that these two Faucis—public Fauci and private Fauci—were totally at odds. And that’s just on COVID’s origins. The diary also reveals Fauci has a very inflated sense of his own self-importance. He’s thrilled about the level of influence he’s achieved, and he’s happy to opine on all sorts of subjects other than sticking to the science. For instance, in his diary, he says he told then-President Donald Trump to implement stricter mitigation measures because the public might punish him at the ballot box if he failed to do what Fauci advised. I guess the doctor decided he was an expert on diseases, public policy, political science, and campaigning.

In his diary, Fauci also states unequivocally that he told New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut down bars, restaurants, and schools. That’s pretty interesting, because when journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon and I interviewed him in 2022, he denied ever having had the power to do that.

“First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down.”

– Fauci https://t.co/33H6vfIoBI pic.twitter.com/4eVoIPdmst

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 26, 2026

Maybe Dr. Fauci should have double-checked his own diary.

Now look, you might be thinking, does this really still matter? COVID-19 is in the rearview mirror, and Fauci is retired. Moreover, as much as these diary entries reveal him to be inconsistent at best and hypocritical at worst, it’s not a crime to have given the president bad advice. That’s all true. But it is a crime to lie to Congress, and there needs to be accountability for public funding of reckless research that maybe experts believe could have been responsible for the creation of the virus. Recall that Fauci has admitted under oath that he may have continued to sign off on gain-of-function research even during the time period that President Barack Obama had ordered it brought to a halt.

Curiously, President Joe Biden’s pardon of Fauci covers that exact time period—the Obama-era pause on gain-of-function research. Not Fauci’s entire career in public service, which goes back decades, and not just Fauci’s time as the Coronavirus advisor, but a 10-year period that includes the pause.

That’s very telling, and we should continue to search for answers, because even if we can’t bring Fauci to justice, we need to know the truth.

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