Anthony Fauci's private diary released, reveals top doc was obsessed with his own rising fame during COVID

Former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.

Republican U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky over the weekend released a trove of diary entries and notes kept by then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, particularly the doctor's copious observations from December 2019 through December 2022 as the COVID pandemic upended life in the United States. 

The entries reveal the man revered by the media as America's top doctor to be manipulative, duplicitous and, above all, obsessed with his own exploding fame as he was continuously venerated by the press. Very early in the pandemic, in April of 2020, as the U.S. government blamed more than 60,000 fatalities on COVID-19, Fauci began taking note of the fact that he was becoming a media darling. 

“Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me,” one cringey entry made on April 7 read. Six weeks later, he luxuriated in his skyrocketing celebrity. Big front page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country." By that point, the death toll was on the verge of hitting 100,000, according to The New York Post. 

Fauci also reveled in his newfound power, boasting to himself about how his decisions impacted the plummeting U.S. stock markets, and marveling at how New York and California shut down schools due to his say-so. The diary entries also reveal he behaved in downright manipulative ways as his personal notes showed what he believed the mortality rate for COVID-19 to be was far less than what he was saying publicly in TV interviews.

And, the diary entries suggest, Fauci was not entirely forthcoming about his and other scientists' assessment that the pandemic may have arisen from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Instead, Fauci firmly pushed the theory that the origin of COVID occurred at a so-called wet market in China or made some other natural animal crossover to humans. 

"What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories," Rand Paul said in a post on X announcing the document dump.

Fauci is now being subpoenaed to testify under oath on Capitol Hill this Wednesday. Read all the journal entries released by Paul here, and watch a short clip below about his upcoming testimony.