RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on June 03, 2024 in Washington, DC. Fauci is expected to appear before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29, 2026. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption
Shots - Health News As Republicans probe COVID's origins, some see an attack on science; others say it's long overdue 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.
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.
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.
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 confere...
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