Newly released diary entries show Anthony Fauci logging his own media coverage even as the pandemic death toll climbed, and Senator Rand Paul says the journals show a gap between what Fauci wrote privately and what he told the public.
On April 7, 2020, with New York City morgues overflowing and the country recording well over a thousand COVID deaths a day, Anthony Fauci sat down and wrote about something else entirely: himself. "Press still hot and heavy about me," he wrote. "Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me." That entry is now public because Senator Rand Paul released it, along with hundreds of pages of Fauci's personal diaries spanning December 2019 through December 2022, as part of his committee's ongoing investigation into the pandemic response.
Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and has spent years clashing with Fauci over the origins of COVID-19 and the limits of federal public health authority, posted the release himself. "My investigation uncovered that Anthony Fauci kept a diary," Paul wrote. "What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories." The diaries chronicle Fauci's calls with President Trump, governors and foreign leaders, interspersed with his own running account of his celebrity status, according to Fox News, which first reported on the entries.
The April 7 entry is not an isolated line. Fox News reported that Fauci's diary repeatedly returns to how much airtime and print coverage he was getting, tracking his own media footprint with the same attention he gave to virus data. He referred to himself elsewhere in the writings as the most famous person in the country during the outbreak. The entries land differently set against the record: April 2020 was the month U.S. COVID deaths first crossed 10,000, then kept climbing past 60,000 by month's end, according to Johns Hopkins tracking data from that period. Millions of Americans were under stay-at-home orders, small businesses were shuttering, and schools nationwide had gone remote. Fauci, the government's most visible face on the crisis, was writing about his own headline count.
The diaries also touch on Fauci's private conversations about the pandemic's origins. Earlier reporting on Paul's document releases this year showed scientists on a January 31, 2020 call telling Fauci that the virus's furin cleavage site raised real doubts about a natural origin, with roughly half the group on that call believing the sequence looked engineered, a striking contrast to the public confidence Fauci and NIH later projected in the natural-origin theory. Paul's office has argued for years that federal officials, including Fauci, downplayed the lab-leak possibility even as internal doubts persisted.
What the diaries mean for a subpoenaed witness
The timing is not incidental. Fauci has been subpoenaed by Paul's committee and is scheduled to testify before the Senate panel in the coming days, making the diary release a direct run-up to sworn questioning under oath. A spokesperson for Fauci has not issued a public response to the specific diary entries as of this writing, and PRN has sought comment from Fauci's representatives.
Paul's committee has framed the release as part of a broader accountability effort that has also produced internal messages the senator says undercut the
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