Fauci, in private diary, reflected on COVID’s origins and his own fame

WASHINGTON — The world was just awakening to the novel coronavirus, and a full-fledged pandemic was still in the future, when Dr. Anthony Fauci jotted a note in his diary on Jan. 26, 2020, musing about whether the virus might have originated in an open-air “wet market,” where live animals were sold, in Wuhan, China.

Read more Bruins coach Marco Sturm earns a German honor

“Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” Fauci, then the government’s top infectious disease specialist, wrote. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

Those private reflections became public this past weekend when Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s typewritten daily notes as part of his investigation into whether the virus might have leaked from a laboratory and whether, as Paul claims, Fauci lied to Congress about it.

The diary does not provide the smoking gun the senator is seeking. Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists’ views evolved. But it further inflames a polarizing political battle over the origins of the virus and how history should treat Fauci.

It also paints a portrait of Fauci as obsessed with himself, reveling in his own importance and the celebrities he knows, from actress Julia Roberts to singers Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand. It shows, as well, the pressure he was under, as he became the public face of the government’s response while at the same time countering what he called “slanderous lies” about him spread by “extreme right elements in society.”

On Wednesday, Fauci is scheduled to testify under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which Paul chairs. Although Fauci received a “preemptive pardon” from President Joe Biden, Paul has repeatedly referred him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

“What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories,” the senator wrote on the social media platform X.

Paul’s office did not respond to requests for comment about how he obtained the diary. But it is typewritten, suggesting Fauci may have taken notes on his work computer, possibly for his memoir, published in 2024.

Fauci declined to comment.

The debate over whether COVID-19 leaked from a lab, either accidentally or intentionally, has raged for years. Some Republicans fixated on it after President Trump floated the idea in the early months of the pandemic in his first term. Democrats rejected the theory, insisting that Trump was trying to blame China while distracting attention from his administration’s failings in containing COVID’s spread.

Fauci has long maintained that he is open to the idea of a lab leak, but believes the virus was natural in origin.

Much of the public discussion has centered on the question of whether the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci led for nearly 40 years, had funded so-called “gain-of-function” research at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

“Gain-of-function” research, which Fauci referred to in his diary as “GOF,” involves tinkering with the genetic makeup of viruses to better understand how they evolve — and to prevent against future pandemics. It is strictly regulated by the government. Fauci has repeatedly insisted that his institute did not fund such research in China, and Paul has insisted that he did.

“If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you,” Fauci said in response to questions from Paul in July 2021.

Read more Court Sense: The East gets tougher for the Celtics ☘️

At the outset of the pandemic, the public health establishment dismissed the idea of a lab leak as a “conspiracy theory.” Fauci wrote as much on Jan. 31, 2020: “There have been conspiracy theories that the virus was given GOF by inserted mutations and deliberately or accidentally released in Wuhan.”

But the diary, echoing previously released emails, reflects that Fauci was uncertain.

When a respected scientist expressed concerns that the virus might have indeed been engineered, Fauci convened a conference call with leading virus experts and evolutionary biologists who debated the idea. In the emails, Fauci had said that if their suspicions bore out, the scientists would have to alert “appropriate authorities,” including the FBI.

“There was not total agreement” on the call, Fauci wrote in the diary. Of 11 scientists, not including Fauci, just two were convinced that the virus emerged naturally. The others were not sure. Fauci did not state his own view.

Paul pointed to the entry as an indication that the scientific establishment was more divided than Fauci let on. He also seized on Fauci’s January 2020 “amplifier” comment as evidence of dishonesty. But Fauci had made the same comment three weeks later in an interview with USA Today.

Fauci, 85, who retired from government service at the end of 2022, has long maintained a public profile. He has advised seven presidents, on matters ranging from AIDS to anthrax and Ebola, and has been a familiar figure in Washington circles, showing up at events like the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Paul has been investigating COVID’s origins, and Fauci, for years.

Some government agencies, including the Department of Energy and the CIA, now favor the lab leak theory. When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration steered the Covid.gov website, used by the Biden administration to promote vaccines, to a new page that blared the words “LAB LEAK: The true origins of Covid-19.”

Last year, the Kentucky senator released some of Fauci’s emails, including one in which Fauci asked Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, to “please delete this email after you read it” — evidence, Paul has said, that Fauci was trying to keep information from Congress.

Fauci’s critics spent much of the past several days digging through the records for tidbits in which he appeared to contradict himself. In a 2022 interview with ABC News, reflecting on his 50 years of public service, Fauci said he had “nothing to do” with school closures.

But in March 2020, he wrote in his diary that he had “convinced” Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York to close city schools. He said he also spoke to a top aide to Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who had “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants,” based on Fauci’s suggestion.

On Monday, Paul released another 500 pages of Fauci’s records. These were from 2001, documenting his work with President George W. Bush to create a program to bring AIDS drugs to Africa.

Bush later awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Read more FIFA plan for Kushner-backed $20 billion operation to run World Cup meets fury from Europe’s UEFA

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.