8 Things We Learned From Anthony Fauci’s Private Diaries

Fauci pushed the CDC to cover up the shot’s inefficacy so mandates could continue

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) on Saturday released a trove of Anthony Fauci’s private journal entries from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ahead of Fauci’s expected testimony this Wednesday.

Sen. Paul obtained the pages as part of his ongoing investigation into COVID-19’s origins and gain-of-function research, subpoenaing Fauci after he reportedly backed out of an earlier agreement to testify voluntarily.

The entries span 2020-2022, written by Fauci as the pandemic unfolded in real time. Here are eight of the biggest revelations.

1. He worried a vaccine would arrive in time to help Trump win

Throughout mid-to-late 2020, Fauci’s diary repeatedly frames a fast vaccine or treatment timeline as a political threat that might help Donald Trump win reelection.

In June, he wrote that he was growing “progressively disillusioned” with task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx over her push to fast-track plasma and vaccine trials, accusing her of trying to hand Trump an “October surprise” and saying he might “blow the whistle” on her.

The following month, he read Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s public comments about upcoming shots the same way, as an attempt to manufacture a late-campaign breakthrough.

By late October, five days before the election, Fauci wrote that he and colleagues Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Clifford Lane were encouraging FDA career scientists to hold off on authorizing antibody treatments from Eli Lilly and Regeneron, even as HHS Secretary Alex Azar pushed to get them approved before voters went to the polls. Fauci described the push as an attempt “to please the POTUS.”

Pfizer announced its 95% vaccine efficacy result six days after the election, after Joe Biden had been announced the winner. Fauci’s diary records Trump later calling FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn to say Azar blamed him for the loss, for sitting on the vaccine news too long.

2. He was obsessed with his celebrity status

Even as case counts climbed, Fauci’s entries return again and again to his press coverage. “Press still hot and heavy about me,” he crowed in April 2020. “Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.”

By May, with the U.S. death toll nearing 10,000, he bragged about a Washington Post profile and described his own fame as “explosive and really unimaginable,” calling himself “the most famous and talked about person in the country.” He further boasted that Trump seemed “enamored” of him despite supposedly pulling focus from the president, and that Secret Service agents had started waving him through White House gates without checking his badge.

The same entry mentions an invitation to appear on Dancing With the Stars.

3. He told Congress a different fatality rate than he believed

On February 8, 2020, Fauci wrote about a call with then-CDC Director Tom Frieden in which the two agreed COVID-19 was behaving like “a bad influenza,” estimating the true case fatality rate at somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3 percent.

Five weeks later, testifying before Congress on March 11, Fauci gave lawmakers a very different number. Asked by Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) to compare COVID-19 to the flu, Fauci said the mortality rate was roughly ten times that of seasonal flu — near 1 percent — and explicitly rejected any comparison to the milder 2009 H1N1 outbreak. That testimony helped shape a year of public health messaging around the virus’s severity.

4. A former FDA commissioner says this wasn’t Fauci’s first publicity play

Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has pointed to the diaries as confirmation of something he says he noticed years earlier, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Makary has described Fauci pushing to transfer a recovering Ebola patient from a Dallas hospital to the NIH’s Clinical Center in Washington, D.C., even though — in Makary’s account — the patient needed nothing beyond standard supportive care already available in Dallas.

Fauci announced the transfer at a congressional hearing, predicting press coverage. Photos later surfaced of Fauci in a hazmat suit visiting the patient, and the NIH held a press conference where Fauci highlighted that her care was free, until a reporter pointed out it was taxpayer-funded.

5. He gave the Millers stricter isolation advice than he gave himself

The diaries also detail Fauci’s private response to a White House COVID scare in May 2020, when Katie Miller — then a Trump administration official who was 10 weeks pregnant — tested positive after attending the same task force meetings as Fauci.

Fauci wrote that he’d spent time in close proximity to Miller and others who later tested positive, including 45 minutes with an infected colleague in the West Wing. Rather than the 14-day isolation he recommended elsewhere, he placed himself on a self-designed “modified quarantine”: daily testing, masking, and mostly working alone. He advised Miller’s husband, adviser Stephen Miller, to move into a hotel for two weeks, away from his pregnant wife, and start his own isolation clock.

6. He had a serious blood clot in his lungs and kept it quiet

A June 19, 2021 entry (now redacted) describes Fauci learning, via CT scan, that he had a pulmonary infarct: dead lung tissue caused by a blood clot blocking a blood vessel. The entry shows doctors starting him on the blood thinner Eliquis. It came roughly six months after his first COVID-19 vaccine dose, which he received on camera on December 22, 2020.

Yet throughout this period, Fauci remained the country’s most visible advocate for the vaccines’ safety, backing mandates that made them a condition of employment, school attendance, and travel for millions of Americans — without ever mentioning, in public, what his own scan had shown.

7. He knew the lab-leak theory had scientific backing — and said the opposite in public

A February 1, 2020 entry describes a conference call with a dozen scientists debating where the virus came from — the same call that led to “Proximal Origin,” the paper Fauci and other officials would go on to cite for years as scientific proof the virus couldn’t have leaked from a lab.

According to Fauci’s own notes, only two of the twelve scientists on that call believed the virus had emerged naturally. “The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible,” he wrote, pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s years of gain-of-function work on coronavirus spike proteins.

Three months later, in May 2020, Fauci told National Geographic that the evidence “strongly” pointed away from a lab origin, citing “qualified evolutionary biologists.” He didn’t mention that most of the scientists he’d personally spoken with a few months earlier did not think so.

By July 2021, in a National Security Council meeting, Fauci’s diary shows him privately dismissing the FBI’s lab-leak assessment while calling a rival natural-origin theory “reasonable,” and steering the conversation back toward the same small circle of scientists who had authored Proximal Origin.

8. He pushed the CDC to cover up the shot’s inefficacy so mandates could continue

An August 13, 2022 entry describes Fauci intervening to stop the CDC from telling the public that the shots weren’t working the way people had been told.

“More drama with regard to the CDC and Rochelle Walensky,” he wrote, describing an effort to get the agency “pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission.”

Fauci wrote that the timing was the problem: such a statement “would conflict with recommending” the updated bivalent booster set to roll out that September, and “would undermine the DOJ’s efforts at mandates.”

According to the entry, the CDC agreed to drop the blunt language and instead describe the shots as offering “only modest and waning efficacy against infection and transmission” — a framing built around the case for getting the new booster.

But Fauci noted the fix didn’t fully take. The CDC’s website reflected the softer language, he wrote, but the agency’s own Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published the very next day, “had the same original damning language.”

What’s next

Fauci is scheduled to testify today before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, under the subpoena Sen. Paul issued. The diaries are expected to feature heavily in the questioning.