For four years, Anthony Fauci told America he was just following the science. No politics. No ego. Just a humble public servant protecting the country from a deadly virus. Now his own diary is out, more than 1,000 pages of it, and it reads less like the private notebook of a careful scientist and more like the datebook of a man falling in love with his own fame while the country buried its dead.
Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, released the entries this week under the title “Tony’s Diary Package.” The pages span December 2019 through December 2022, the entire arc of the pandemic response Fauci ran from behind the podium. Paul says the diary is Fauci’s own writing. Fauci will get the chance to confirm or dispute that himself on Wednesday, July 29, when he testifies under oath before the committee, a hearing he only agreed to after Paul subpoenaed him this June, following Fauci backing out of a voluntary appearance he’d previously agreed to.
Start with the part that should end any lingering debate about Fauci’s credibility on COVID’s origins. According to the diary, on January 31, 2020, barely a month into the crisis, Fauci convened a call with top virologists to discuss the virus’s furin cleavage site, a genetic feature that doesn’t occur naturally in this family of coronaviruses. About half the scientists on that call reportedly told him it looked “constructed.” Not “impossible to rule out.” Constructed. That’s the private conversation.
Publicly, for years afterward, Fauci stood in front of cameras and dismissed the lab leak theory as fringe, conspiratorial, even racist, while reporters and platforms treated anyone who raised it as a crank. His own diary now shows the man setting that narrative had serious doubts baked in from week one.
This isn’t the first time Fauci’s public testimony hasn’t held up. His own agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, funded EcoHealth Alliance’s coronavirus research, including subawards that flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci told Rand Paul directly, under oath, that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” The former acting director of the NIH later testified that the agency had, in fact, funded exactly that kind of research in Wuhan through the EcoHealth grant, and the Department of Health and Human Services moved to formally debar EcoHealth and its president over the matter. Add the diary’s furin cleavage site admission to that record and you don’t get a pattern of innocent misstatements. You get a pattern.
Then there’s the fame. If you ever suspected Fauci enjoyed being the most famous man in America more than he let on, the diary removes the suspicion.
He wrote about Julia Roberts hosting him on Instagram Live, sending him flowers, and later presenting him with an award. Anna Wintour, Trevor Noah, Steph Curry, Sean Penn, Matt Damon, and Lil Wayne all show up in his pages, a running tally of Hollywood and celebrity attention arriving while over a million Americans were dying and small businesses were being shuttered by mandates he helped design. At the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors, Fauci recorded hugging Hunter Biden, who joked that if anyone photographed the two of them together the internet “would explode” because they were both “being attacked by the far right GOP.” That’s the private mindset of the man millions of parents trusted to tell them whether it was safe to send their kids back to school.
The early Trump material cuts against the media’s preferred narrative too. Fauci’s own entries describe Trump directing reporters’ questions to him in briefings, calling him “the smartest person in the world,” and telling him “we are counting on you.” The relationship soured later, and plenty of that souring was mutual and public. But the diary confirms what conservatives said all along and Fauci’s allies spent years denying: in the early days, Trump deferred to Fauci completely, gave him the microphone, and let him run the show. When the pandemic response went sideways, on lockdowns that dragged on, on school closures that wrecked a generation of kids, on mask guidance that flipped more than once, Fauci was not a sidelined bureaucrat overruled by a reckless president. He was, by his own written account, the man Trump was “counting on.”
Paul has also accused Fauci of directing staff to dispose of federal records connected to the pandemic response, an allegation Paul says he’ll press at Wednesday’s hearing. That is a serious charge and it deserves to be treated as an allegation until Fauci answers for it on the record, not as a proven fact. But it’s exactly the kind of question that should be asked under oath, in public, by senators who were mocked for years for asking it.
Here is the bottom line. The man who told the country to trust the institutions was privately building his own celebrity brand and privately entertaining doubts about the virus’s origin that he refused to share with the public he claimed to serve. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is his own handwriting.
Wednesday’s hearing is not about relitigating mask mandates for sport. It’s about whether the single most powerful unelected official of the pandemic era gets to walk away from cameras, book deals, and a hero’s send off without ever answering, under oath, for the gap between what he wrote in private and what he told the American people. Every senator on that committee should ask him directly about the furin cleavage site call, about the diary’s authenticity, and about those missing records. And they should not let him filibuster his way past the answer the way he’s filibustered every hard question for four years.
America was told to trust the science. It’s time Fauci trusted the truth.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any views expressed within the following article are solely those of the author and are not a direct reflection of any official stance of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
