Anthony Fauci is 85 years old. He is testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee today at the invitation of its chairman, Rand Paul, who has been trying to get him there for six years and who dumped 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diaries on the internet 48 hours before the hearing to ensure that nobody arrives in that room without having read what Fauci wrote about them. Several of those people are in that room.
The single most consequential diary entry, per Fox News’s confirmed reporting, is dated January 26, 2020. Fauci wrote privately that the Wuhan wet market was “not the source” of COVID-19 but “the amplifier.” He wrote this four days before January 31, when he personally told scientist Kristian Andersen to take his furin cleavage site concerns to the FBI and to MI5 in the United Kingdom. Days after that conversation, Andersen and eleven other scientists produced the Proximal Origin paper, which publicly ruled out a lab leak and described the wet market as the likely origin. Fauci publicly endorsed the paper’s conclusions and publicly dismissed the lab leak theory for the next two years. His diary entry from January 26 is the entry he wrote before any of this.
The diaries also reveal Fauci writing that it was “not hyperbole” to describe himself as “the most famous and talked about person in the country,” an assessment he committed to paper while the pandemic was killing more than 1,000 Americans per day. They contain his description of Trump as someone who “still does not understand the pandemic” and his account of being forced to take control of a White House meeting because Trump was discussing TV ratings and hydroxychloroquine instead of public health. They contain his observation that Trump’s conduct had become “even more erratic” by August 2020. They contain his notes on interactions with Julia Roberts, Hunter Biden, Dana Bash, and Larry Ellison, whom he described as “a bit of a loose cannon.” They contain his lobbying of NIH colleagues to nominate him for a cash prize, per Paul’s Fox News op-ed: “Will you nominate me? I’ll write up my nominating background for you, and then you nominate me.”
ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNOW all ignored the diary release on their broadcast programming, per Fox News’s media desk, which means the 1,000 pages of Fauci’s private thoughts were available for 48 hours before today’s hearing without the networks that covered Fauci daily for three years mentioning them on air. The networks have not addressed this gap. Fauci has not addressed the diary entries specifically. The hearing starts today.
The lab leak question has not been definitively resolved. Fauci’s January 26, 2020 diary entry has now been read by Rand Paul’s committee. The hearing is today.
When the private diary of the country’s most famous pandemic official says the wet market wasn’t the source four days before he helped produce the paper saying it was, what exactly is the Senate hearing about?
Sources
Fox News Live: Fauci hearing, Senate, Rand Paul, July 29
Fox News: Inside Fauci’s private diary
Fox News Rundown: Inside the Fauci Diaries
Raw Story: Trump’s erratic behavior detailed in Anthony Fauci diaries
