Paul releases Fauci diaries ahead of COVID origins hearing

Sen. Rand Paul has released more than 1,000 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary entries, setting up a renewed confrontation Wednesday over the origins of COVID-19 and what the former top U.S. infectious disease official said publicly and privately as the crisis unfolded.

Paul, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, subpoenaed Fauci to testify as part of the panel’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and what Paul has described as risky taxpayer-funded life sciences research. NPR reported that Paul published a 1,141-page document over the weekend, though it was no longer available on his website Monday.

The entries span December 2019, just before the U.S. declared a public health emergency, through December 2022, when Fauci stepped down as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases after nearly four decades in the post.

Paul, who has long argued that a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China should not be discounted, wrote on X: “What [Fauci] wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.” On Monday, he accused Fauci of saying one thing to “Dear Diary” while telling the public “it’s implausible that it came from the lab,” adding, “that level of dishonesty is really astounding.”

Fauci’s entries show early uncertainty about the virus’s source. In a Jan. 26, 2020, entry highlighted by Paul, Fauci wrote that “the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market” and that “we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.” In the same entry, he added: “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

About a week later, Fauci described a conference call with infectious disease experts debating whether a key part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally. According to his notes, only two scientists voiced support for a natural origin, while “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

Many scientists believe the evidence supports a natural spillover from infected bats through other animals to humans at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late 2019. But the FBI has assessed that the coronavirus “most likely” emerged from a “lab incident in Wuhan.” In January 2025, the CIA issued a new assessment favoring the “lab leak” hypothesis, while saying it had “low confidence” in that finding.

Felicia Goodrum, a virologist at Dartmouth College, told NPR that Fauci may have been less certain in private while scientists were racing to understand a new virus than he was in public while addressing a frightened population. “We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time,” she said, “but then you’re going to keep working.”

Fauci’s own May 26, 2021, entry addressed criticism that he had shifted his position. “I had always said that the very highly likelihood is that the virus originated naturally from an animal reservoir jumping to a human,” he wrote. But he added that, given speculation about a lab leak, “no one is 100% certain of the origin including me and so I am calling for a thorough investigation.”

The diaries also describe Fauci’s strained relationship with President Donald Trump. In May 2020, before an event announcing Operation Warp Speed, Fauci wrote that Trump pulled him aside and said, “Tony, you are losing me trillions of f***ing dollars,” then later told him, “you and I are OK.” Fauci also wrote that Trump argued officials should not wear masks at the event because it “sends the wrong signal,” while Fauci pushed back.

Fauci’s notes describe some cordial moments with Trump, but also call the president’s news conferences “painfully rambling” and “laborious.” By August 2020, Fauci wrote that Trump was acting “erratically” and referred to him as an “idiot” for posting inaccurate COVID-19 death figures.

The entries also capture Fauci’s long-running clashes with Paul. After a July 2021 Senate hearing over whether the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, Fauci wrote: “I finished by looking him in the eye and telling him that if anybody is lying here it is he.”

CBS News said it had sought comment from Fauci and the White House. NPR said Fauci and Paul did not respond to requests for comment before publication.