Fauci Diary Reveals Early COVID-Origin Concerns, Obsession With Newfound Fame
Anthony Fauci will testify this week before the Senate committee Rand Paul heads.
Anthony Fauci’s private diary entries throughout the COVID‑19 pandemic reveal a man who early considered the possibility the virus had been constructed before publicly supporting natural emergence, mocked lawmakers who challenged him while he was testifying under oath, and socialized with the journalists and pundits covering the crisis he was helping manage.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul released more than 1,100 pages of the diary Saturday, covering December 2019 through Dr. Fauci’s retirement from federal service as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director and White House chief medical adviser in December 2022.
The pages — stamped “Released by Chairman Rand Paul” — were obtained through the panel’s ongoing investigation into the federal pandemic response.
The entries will figure prominently in Dr. Fauci’s testimony before the committee at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. He is the only witness listed.
Dr. Fauci received “a full and unconditional pardon” from then-President Joe Biden covering his federal service from January 1, 2014, through January 19, 2025. The pardon substantially limits his potential federal criminal exposure for conduct covered by it, although its effect on any Fifth Amendment claim would depend on the questions asked and whether an answer could expose him to prosecution outside the pardon’s scope.
Mr. Paul and others will question Dr. Fauci about contradictions between his public statements about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and those in his diary.
In a June 7, 2021, entry, Dr. Fauci wrote that on January 31, 2020, he received a call from Jeremy Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, “who conferenced in [Kristian] Andersen to tell me that Ed Holmes and [Kristian] had seen a copy of the sequence of the virus and felt that there was a possibility that because of the unusual furin cleavage site that this could possibly have been a constructed virus.”
He said he assembled a group of scientists, including then-National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins, to discuss the finding. “After a considerable amount of discussion about half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence,” he wrote.
He said Mr. Andersen and other scientists later concluded the virus was not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus and published that finding in a peer‑reviewed journal in March 2020 — a paper that government officials later cited in discussions of the virus’s possible origin.
Dr. Fauci, leaving the White House February 12, 2000, “ran into Larry Kudlow, who has become my new best friend,” he wrote. “His main question was when is this COVID19 going to crash the economy, i.e. when does he need to start worrying about it.” He told Mr. Kudlow “that we are OK for now,” he said. “He asked me to keep him informed when in my opinion things are starting to go bad.” In fact, a Chinese official told Dr. Fauci nine days earlier that asymptomatic people can transmit the virus.
The diary also offers Dr. Fauci’s private account of a combative July 20, 2021, Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing in which Mr. Paul accused him of lying under oath about whether the NIH had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“I exploded right back at Senator Paul and told him that he had no idea what he was talking about,” Dr. Fauci wrote that day, adding he told the senator, “If anybody is lying here it is he.”
Of a second Republican questioner that day, Dr. Fauci wrote Senator Roger Marshall, who is also a physician, asked about the furin cleavage site before rambling about the spike protein and “had absolutely no idea what he was talking about,” adding, “He made a fool of himself.”
Dr. Fauci also noted that Democratic senators spoke up afterward to say how confident they were in his integrity.
Three months later, October 21, Dr. Fauci recorded that NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak had disclosed in an October 20 letter to House Republicans a late progress report showing that mice in an EcoHealth Alliance‑funded experiment linked to the Wuhan lab “became sicker than the controls” — an outcome Dr. Fauci acknowledged “could be interpreted by some as ‘gain of function.’”
In the same entry, he turned on one of his most persistent critics, Rutgers University biochemist Richard Ebright, who had accused him of lying to Congress: “I must write something about this complete idiot In my book since he really is a horrible person.”
The entries repeatedly record Dr. Fauci’s attention to his growing celebrity and media coverage.
In an October 2020 entry recounting a wave of television appearances, he wrote that on ABC’s “Good Morning America” he “blew away the Great Barrington Declaration,” the open letter by Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford epidemiologists that argued for a more targeted pandemic strategy rather than broad lockdowns.
In a separate entry, Dr. Fauci wrote of his own fame: “It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country.”
The diary also documents a running social calendar with prominent journalists who covered him. On July 1, 2020, Dr. Fauci wrote: “Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC. Terrific couple. Friendship building.” Less than four months later, on October 23 — the day after the final presidential debate — he wrote: “Had dinner at my home with Jake and Jennifer Tapper. Relaxed, good time. Jake clearly believes that Trump is totally nuts.”
Dr. Fauci wrote June 26, 2021, that he and his wife “had dinner over the home of Sally Quinn,” the longtime Washington Post writer, where “other guests were Bob Woodward and Elsa Walsh as well as Rick and Jane Atkinson.” The group had “a lot of inside the Beltway discussions about Bob’s books and Rick’s books and the experience that I had with Trump during the last year of his presidency.”
He described a similar gathering January 6, 2020, when he attended a book party at the home of David and Katherine Bradley, describing the “Super A list” of guests as “Senator Mark Warner, Kellyanne Conway, Andrea Mitchell, David Ignatius, David Frum, Zeke Emanuel, etc., etc.”
In a July 26 social-media post concerning a separately released email in which Dr. Fauci instructed a staff member to delete the message, Mr. Paul called the instruction “a blatant violation, a betrayal of the public trust, and further proof that Fauci engaged in a coverup from the very beginning of the pandemic.” He said he would question Dr. Fauci about the email Wednesday.
The Washington Star has contacted Mr. Paul’s office for comment.
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