Fauci Diary Entries Reveal Early Private Doubts on COVID Origins and Fatality Rates That Clash with Public Testimony

Newly released personal notes kept by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic contain assessments that diverge sharply from his public statements and congressional testimony on the virus’s origins, lethality, and the policy responses he influenced.

The 1,100-plus-page compilation, released by Sen. Rand Paul as part of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s oversight work, includes entries from late 2019 through subsequent years. Paul has described the private writings as showing “two different stories” between what Fauci recorded for himself and what he told the public and lawmakers. Fauci is scheduled to appear before the committee this week under subpoena.

One of the most striking discrepancies involves the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, long presented as the likely epicenter of a natural spillover from animals to humans. In a January 26, 2020, entry, Fauci wrote that epidemiological and genomic data indicated the first infection occurred in early December 2019 “and was not connected to the market.” He continued: “Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market… Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.” The note still allowed for an eventual animal-to-human jump somewhere, but it rejected the market itself as the origin point. Publicly, Fauci and other officials repeatedly emphasized the market as the site of zoonotic spillover in the months that followed, including in White House briefings and support for the “Proximal Origin” paper published in March 2020 that strongly favored a natural origin and dismissed laboratory involvement as implausible.

A related entry from February 1, 2020, recounts a conference call with a dozen scientists that helped shape the Proximal Origin paper. According to Fauci’s notes, only two of the twelve participants were “sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this.” The remaining scientists “felt that deliberate insertion was possible,” particularly in light of gain-of-function research conducted by Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology aimed at adapting coronavirus spike proteins to human ACE2 receptors. The private tally stands in contrast to the public scientific consensus that later emerged, which portrayed natural origin as the overwhelming or sole credible explanation and treated lab-leak hypotheses as fringe or conspiratorial for an extended period.

The diary also records a markedly lower estimate of the virus’s case fatality rate than Fauci provided in early public testimony. In one entry he described a conversation with former CDC Director Tom Frieden in which both agreed the outbreak was behaving like a severe influenza in transmissibility and that the true number of infections was far larger than the then-reported figures. This led them to calculate a case fatality rate “more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.” In March 2020 testimony before the House Oversight Committee, however, Fauci stated the overall mortality rate was about three percent, later adjusting downward to around one percent when including milder or asymptomatic cases—still describing the pathogen as roughly ten times more lethal than seasonal flu.

Additional entries show Fauci privately taking credit for influencing lockdown decisions even as he later denied recommending such measures. A March 15, 2020, note marked “BIG DAY!” describes conversations in which he said he helped convince New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close schools and noted that California officials had decided to shutter schools, bars, and restaurants based in part on his television appearances. In subsequent interviews and 2024 congressional testimony, Fauci maintained that he had not recommended locking down businesses or schools.

Other passages reflect concern over public criticism, including repeated mentions of attacks by Elon Musk on the social media platform then known as Twitter, and discussions of interactions with longtime adviser David Morens that later became the subject of congressional scrutiny. Paul has also pointed to notes he interprets as evidence of efforts to manage or destroy records, though the precise language and context of those entries remain part of the broader investigative record.

Fauci has consistently maintained that the available scientific evidence supports a natural origin and that his public statements accurately reflected the evolving data and expert consensus at the time. The diary entries do not, by themselves, establish intentional deception, but they document private assessments in the critical early weeks of the outbreak that diverged from the messaging that dominated official communications for months afterward. With Fauci’s upcoming testimony, the notes are expected to form a central line of questioning about what was known, when it was known, and how private scientific debate translated—or failed to translate—into public guidance during one of the most consequential public-health crises in modern history.