Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., published a tranche of diary entries over the weekend made by Dr. Anthony Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 1,141-page document, which was released over the weekend and was no longer available on the website on Monday, came ahead of Fauci's appearance before a Senate committee on Wednesday. The entries, and Paul's commentary on them, highlight the disagreement between the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and some politicians over the origins of the coronavirus.
Paul and Fauci — who served as a key member of the White House's Coronavirus Task Force — have disagreed publicly for years over how the pandemic began. Even after Fauci stepped down from his position at NIAID at the end of 2022, Paul has continued to conduct an "investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and risky taxpayer-funded life sciences research."
On Saturday afternoon, as part of this ongoing inquiry, Paul published a thread on X describing the release of a string of what he called diary entries made by Fauci from December 2019 through December 2022. Paul commented on X at the start of the posts, "What [Fauci] wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories."
Fauci and Paul did not respond to an NPR request for comment prior to publication.
Felicia Goodrum, a virologist at Dartmouth College who spoke to NPR from the American Society for Virology meeting in Minneapolis, says that it's possible that Fauci may have been less certain in private with his colleagues as they were racing to learn about the new virus than he was in public where he had to assure a population that was panicking over the rapidly emerging pandemic.
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This thread emerges ahead of a scheduled hearing on Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs. Paul unilaterally subpoenaed Fauci to testify after he said that Fauci notified the committee that he wouldn't appear voluntarily. Lawmakers are expected to question Fauci about what he knew and didn't know as the pandemic was unfolding.
What is Rand Paul looking to hear from Anthony Fauci?
For years, Paul and Fauci have differed over the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Fauci has asserted that the scientific evidence points to a spillover — whereby the virus would have found its way from an animal into its first human host, and then spread at that point from human to human.
Proponents of this theory point to the wet market in Wuhan where potentially infected animals were waiting to be sold. "There's very good evidence that there are two lineages [of SARS-CoV-2] that emerged," according to Goodrum. "Both of those lineages were present at the market, and susceptible animals were present at the market."
Goodrum says the market was cleared before it was possible to take any samples. However, she says the genetic data "maps all initial cases to that market" and "none to, for example, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they have accused the virus of having been created or released."
Most scientists in the virology community share this view, according to a survey published in February 2024 by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a nonpartisan U.S.-based think tank that studies potentially catastrophic events.
Paul has advocated for an alternative explanation. He says the possibility that the virus was engineered in a lab should not be discounted. Two years ago during a full Senate committee hearing, Paul said, "Do we know for certain it came from the lab? No, but there's a preponderance of evidence indicating that it may have come from the lab."
In late 2024, the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic published their final report that concluded a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the origins of SARS-CoV-2. They suggested that funds from the NIH may have helped support research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make a more potent or transmissible virus. Such viral enhancement is called gain of function.
But Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University, says he disputes this line of reasoning because there is "no actual evidence for it." And he says that no one, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had a precursor virus similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 to create the pathogen that ultimately caused the pandemic.
Still, Paul suggests that Fauci, his colleagues, and certain federal agencies may have covered up any evidence to support the lab leak theory. In his view, he said in that same statement, they "withheld and continue to conceal crucial information from both Congress and the public."
As noted, NPR reached out to Fauci about Paul's comments, but did not receive a response before publication.
What does Paul say these newly published diary entries reveal?
In his posts on X, Paul highlights a few select excerpts from Fauci's notes. For instance, he points to an entry on Jan. 26, 2020, not quite two months before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, where Fauci writes, "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."
Paul notes in his post, "The wet market was already off the table in [Fauci's] own private notes."
But in that same journal entry, Fauci adds, "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."
Not quite a week later, in an entry penned on Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci listed the dozen researchers who participated in a conference call debating the origins of COVID-19. Specifically, they were talking about the plausibility that a key part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally.
According to his notes, only two of the scientists voiced support for a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. "The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible," he wrote, referring to the hypothesis that the virus was engineered in a lab.
In response to that passage, Paul wrote on X, "This was never a 50/50 room," suggesting that early scientific consensus considered a lab leak possible.
But Goodrum says that this meeting took place very early on, when scientists did not have as much data as they would later. The virologist points out that science is iterative and takes time to play out. What some of those scientists believed at the start gave way to a different consensus as more evidence emerged.
"We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time, but then you're going to keep working," she says. "And then you're going to ultimately revise the original conclusions that you made. You will change your mind. That's absolutely fundamental to the way science is done. And it's something that Fauci wasn't really given any latitude to do."
Goodrum adds that it's possible that Fauci may have been less certain in private with his colleagues as they were racing to learn about the new virus than he was in public where he had to assure a public panicking over the rapidly emerging pandemic.
What happens next?
Fauci and Paul will again face off publicly on Wednesday when he testifies before the senator's committee. Paul is likely to ask Fauci about the contents of his notes and the specific lines of concern that he identified in his thread on X.
Fauci may respond to the questions as he has before, describing his thought process and that of his colleagues at different points throughout the pandemic.
Previously, Fauci has expressed disinterest in questions about unproven claims regarding the pandemic. On Aug. 24, 2021, he wrote in his diary, "More conspiracy theory like letters keep coming in from congressmen and senators trying to link us to the origin of COVID-19. This is an amazing and unbelievable waste of our time."
But in his thread over the weekend, Paul argued this wasn't a waste at all. Rather, "it's oversight."
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