Fauci set for high-profile hearing after Paul released diaries

Healthcare Fauci set for high-profile hearing after Paul released diaries Comments: by Joseph Choi - 07/28/26 6:22 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Joseph Choi - 07/28/26 6:22 PM ET Comments: Link copied

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Former chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci is set to be under the microscope for a tough Senate hearing on Wednesday, just days after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s diary entries from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the weekend leading up to the hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s private diary entries, arguing the writings prove the longtime scientist discussed the origins of the virus differently in public from how he did in private. The senator on Monday released roughly 500 additional pages of Fauci’s work records and emails spanning from 2001 to 2015.

Fauci, the former longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), last appeared before Congress more than two years ago for a highly contentious House hearing to go over his tenure as the nation’s leading infectious disease expert during the pandemic.

Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate panel is likely to take a similar turn. Paul, the committee’s chair, and Fauci have a years-long history of getting into combative arguments during congressional hearings.

Paul claimed Monday that Fauci’s diary reveals a “level of dishonesty” that is “really astounding.”

Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist, epidemiologist and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, argued releasing thousands of pages worth of Fauci’s private and work-related documents less than a week before the hearing served more as a distraction than a grand reveal.

“Why was this done so close to the time of the hearing if they, in all seriousness, wanted people to read and digest this?” Gounder, who also served on the coronavirus advisory board for former President Biden’s transition team, told The Hill. “I did not see any bombshells in what was released.”

Paul vs. Fauci

The feud between the senator and the scientist stems from their divergent views on how the COVID-19 pandemic originated.

Paul supports the lab-leak theory on the origins of COVID-19, which posits that the pandemic originated from a virus being experimented on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Since 2021, Paul has repeatedly accused the NIH of funding this research, which Fauci has continually denied.

Fauci holds the position that the SARS-CoV-2 virus most likely originated from nature based on the available evidence.

As recently as May, Paul called for Fauci to be indicted for what the senator claimed to be perjury, accusing the scientist of lying under oath about funding gain-of-function research in China.

A diary entry from Nov. 4, 2021, shows that Fauci had grown to expect hostility from Paul.

“I together with Dawn O’Connell, Janet Woodcock, Rochelle Walensky testified before the Senate HELP hearing chaired by Patty Murray,” he wrote. “We had expected to have the same conflict with Senator Rand Paul who continues to lie egregiously about the gain of function research which he claims was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded by NIAID.”

COVID-19 origin beliefs

There does not appear to be a smoking gun admission from Fauci that he ever believed in the lab-leak theory. Early entries show, however, that he did not think the virus originated from a Wuhan wet market where live animals were sold, though he publicly said early on in the pandemic that the outbreak was a “direct result” of unsanitary shopping conditions.

The contention appears to boil down to a difference between what Fauci considered to be the source of the pandemic as opposed to the cause of it.

The diary entries reveal that Fauci was well aware of the lab-leak theory very early on in the pandemic, writing about it on Jan. 31, 2020. He recalled speaking with evolutionary biologists who believed the virus could not have mutated naturally. In response, he suggested convening a larger body to investigate this.

A March 2020 paper hotly contested by proponents of the lab-leak theory stated it was “possible that an animal source was present at” the Wuhan wet market. Fauci was one of several scientists on a conference call with the authors of this paper and later cited it when speaking from the White House.

Prior to this, Fauci had concluded that the wet market in Wuhan was “not the source, it was the amplifier” of the coronavirus, while adding in a diary entry, “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

Paul argued Monday that Fauci’s support of the paper while privately concluding the wet market was not the source of the outbreak was a “level of dishonesty” that is “really astounding.”

In later diary entries, Fauci noted his own lack of expertise on this specific topic, writing, “Since I am not an evolutionary biologist I called together by phone a group [of] knowledgeable scientist together with Francis Collins and a few other people to discuss this.”

“I had always said that the very highly likelihood is that the virus originated naturally from an animal reservoir jumping to a human,” Fauci wrote on May 26, 2021. “However, over the past couple of days given the amount of speculation about the possibility of a lab leak I have been saying that no one is 100% certain of the origin including me and so I am calling for a thorough investigation.”

In July 2021, Fauci recounted a meeting with the National Security Council in which he strongly disagreed with the FBI’s conclusion that the pandemic originated from a lab leak.

“The reasons that they give do not make any sense. In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species in the environment. I spent some time explaining to Maher [Bitar] and Beth [Cameron] my own theories that the Chinese act like they’re covering up something even when they have nothing to cover up.”

Gounder noted that some parts of Fauci’s diary entries were not released, saying, “I think number one: If you’re going to release something like this, why not just release everything? So that makes me wonder: What are you not releasing? What are you hiding?”

Unguarded thoughts

Fauci penned his unrestrained feelings about political figures, both positive and negative, in his diary. While publicly apolitical, Fauci’s diary shows that he vehemently disliked how right-wing conservatives talked to him and about him.

Following a November 2021 Senate hearing, he wrote that he held back from calling Paul “a liar, which he is.”

In December 2020, he called Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a senator from Florida, a “real a‑‑hole” for having called him a liar about vaccinations. In the same entry, he called Rubio a “hypocrite” continuing to ” kiss Trump’s a‑‑ — the world’s biggest liar.”

He called former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) an “amazing coward” after the lawmaker called for him to be fired in June 2021.

“The entire extreme right wing republican group in the House and Senate have completely sold their soul to the infinitely lying ex president trump,” he wrote.

By contrast, it seems Fauci felt a sense of camaraderie among Democrats. He recalled in a House briefing that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave him a “big hug, kiss and telling everyone how great I am – little embarrassing. Diane DeGette did the same thing.”

At the time of the 2024 House hearing, Democrats argued no new information had been revealed that advanced any theories on the origins of COVID-19. Gounder, of KFF, said Paul’s document releases amounted to the same.

“There’s no new science there, and there’s no admission by Dr. Fauci that this was a lab leak, that this was engineered in the lab,” she said. “It’s a huge document dump where people don’t have time to digest it, and so that then leads people to ask, ‘Well, I didn’t have time to read through it, but there must be something there because why would he put it out there?'”

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