Washington — Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has released more than 1,100 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci's personal diary entries from the COVID-19 pandemic, plunging the nation's former top infectious disease expert back into the center of a political firestorm just hours before he is set to testify under subpoena on Capitol Hill.
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| Rand Paul Releases Fauci's 1,100-Page Pandemic Diary Ahead of Heated Senate Showdown |
Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, published the documents—spanning December 2019 through December 2022—over the weekend on X, briefly removed them Monday evening, and reposted them Tuesday morning with redactions. The release also included a 465-page "prequel" of Fauci's records and email exchanges from 2001 to 2015.
The timing was unmistakable: Fauci is scheduled to appear before Paul's committee Wednesday after the Kentucky Republican unilaterally subpoenaed him, claiming the former NIAID director had declined to testify voluntarily.
"What He Wrote Privately vs. What He Said Publicly"
Paul framed the release as proof of a double game. "What [Fauci] wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories," Paul wrote on X.
The senator zeroed in on a January 26, 2020 entry—weeks before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic—in which Fauci wrote: "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier." Paul seized on the line as evidence that Fauci privately dismissed the wet-market theory while publicly leaving the door open to natural origins.
Yet the same entry also contained a caveat Paul did not emphasize: "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."
Another passage Paul highlighted came from a February 1, 2020 conference call among a dozen top researchers debating whether a key feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally. According to Fauci's notes, only two scientists voiced support for a natural origin, while "the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible." Paul posted: "This was never a 50/50 room."
Virologists pushed back on Paul's interpretation. Felicia Goodrum of Dartmouth College noted that the call took place in the pandemic's earliest days, when data was scarce, and that science is iterative: "We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time... You will change your mind. That's absolutely fundamental to the way science is done."
Fame, Frustration, and "Total Nut Cakes"
Beyond the origins debate, the diary offers a rare window into Fauci's psyche as he was transformed from a career bureaucrat into a global celebrity—and a political target.
On May 21, 2020, Fauci wrote with apparent astonishment: "The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world." He catalogued his pop-culture footprint: Brad Pitt's Saturday Night Live impression, a Billy Crystal spoof, Fauci masks and bobbleheads, and even an email from Barbra Streisand.
But the entries also chronicled growing friction with President Trump. In May 2020, ahead of the Operation Warp Speed announcement, Trump pulled Fauci aside and, according to the diary, said: "Tony, you are losing me trillions of f***ing dollars." Later in the conversation, Trump asked, "Tony, we are good, right?" Fauci replied: "We are good Mr. President." By August 2020, Fauci described Trump as acting "erratically" and called him an "idiot" for posting inaccurate COVID death figures.
Fauci reserved some of his sharpest language for Paul himself. In April 2021, he wrote that Paul was among those spreading "conspiracy theories...to try and connect me with the virus from WUHAN." After his emails were released in 2021, Fauci wrote that "the crazies such as senator Rand Paul are saying things like 'I told you so'... Total nut cakes!" He also referred to critics as "radical right-wing maniacs" while privately taking credit for nudging the CDC to loosen its outdoor mask guidance in May 2021.
How the Documents Emerged
It remains unclear exactly how Paul obtained the diary. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News the entries were retrieved from government computer servers in recent months, and in a video posted Tuesday, Kennedy said they were dug "out of 11 separate servers."
Fauci declined to comment to multiple outlets about the release. However, NPR reviewed a letter from Fauci's legal team to Paul last month accusing the senator of waging a "years-long public crusade" and being "single-mindedly fixating on seeing Dr. Fauci prosecuted for imaginary crimes." A spokesperson also sent NPR a document fact-checking Paul's claims.
The Wednesday Showdown
The hearing is expected to be the latest and most explosive chapter in a years-long feud. Paul has long accused Fauci of misleading Congress and the public about whether the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a charge Fauci has consistently denied under oath.
While most scientists maintain that the virus likely emerged naturally from an animal reservoir, the FBI has assessed that a lab leak is the "most likely" origin, and in January 2025 the CIA issued a low-confidence assessment favoring the lab-leak hypothesis.
For his part, Fauci seemed to anticipate the endless cycle of investigations in an August 2021 diary entry: "More conspiracy theory like letters keep coming in from congressmen and senators trying to link us to the origin of COVID-19. This is an amazing and unbelievable waste of our time."
Paul, posting on X over the weekend, had a different verdict: "It's oversight."
