Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., recently released former Covid czar Anthony Fauci’s diary entries surrounding his horrific handling of the viral outbreak, and boy is it a doozy. From proving the accuracy of The Federalist’s Covid reporting to reaffirming that Fauci has an obsession with … well, Fauci … the records further underscore how government officials lied to the public in the name of power and prestige.
That final point is especially true for Fauci, who, the documents show, parroted several falsehoods throughout the pandemic.
Covid Fatality
When the Covid outbreak became widespread, power-hungry government officials treated it as the second coming of the bubonic plague as a pretext to lockdown society. Yet the virus’ risks to the general population were not nearly as deadly as what they were made out to be — a fact Fauci recognized early on.
In an entry dated Feb. 8, 2020, Fauci described a purported phone call he had with Tom Frieden, who served as President Obama’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director. According to Fauci, the two discussed “various aspects of the [Covid] outbreak.”
The then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director wrote that he and Frieden “are on the same page” in their assessment that the Covid-19 virus “is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator” of total diagnosed cases “is much greater than” currently reported figures. Fauci further noted that this would make the “case fatality rate (CFR)” — the proportion of people who die from a disease among the total number infected over a certain period of time — “more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.”
Put another way, the risk of dying from Covid among the general population is not as great as initially feared.
Yet that’s not the tune that Fauci sang to the public in the weeks to come.
During a March 10, 2020, Hannity appearance, Fauci said that the “mortality for seasonal flu is 0.1,” and that the mortality for Covid-19 “is about 2, 2.5 percent.” While he subsequently noted that “[i]t’s probably lower than that” and “probably closer to 1 [percent],” he then stated, “But even if it’s 1, it’s ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu. You got to make sure that people understand that.”
Fauci would regurgitate similar rhetoric when testifying before Congress the following day. Under questioning from Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, the then-NIAID director said that “the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent,” and that “[t]he stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three.”
“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand,” Fauci said.
Lab Leak Theory
Fauci was notorious for pouring cold water on the theory that the Covid-19 outbreak came as the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. But the newly released diary entries show Fauci himself acknowledged early on that the theory of the virus resulting from a Wuhan wet market — which he later appeared to parrot as the likely explanation, along with many others — lacked substantiation.
In a Jan. 26, 2020, entry, Fauci noted that recent “epi data and genomic data” indicated that “the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market.” He went on to recall how the Chinese government had claimed “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. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans,” Fauci wrote (emphasis added).
School Closures
Fauci has claimed in the Covid lockdowns’ aftermath that he had nothing to do with state and local governments closing their schools over the virus — an unscientific policy decision that caused incredible harm to America’s children. But that’s not what his diary shows.
In a March 15, 2020, entry, Fauci is seen bragging about convincing Democrat officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close their schools over the virus.
“I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor – NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV). I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC,” Fauci wrote. “He said that he would base this on my recommendation. I had a similar call with Ann O’Leary, the COS of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. Ann said that based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”
Covid Vaccines
In October 2021, Fauci was on national television telling audiences that the best ways for the country “to get those [new Covid] cases down” was for “people [to get] vaccinated” and follow CDC guidance advising people to avoid large gatherings. The implication, as it seems, was that Covid vaccination was an effective way to help stop the virus’ spread.
And yet, the health official wrote in his diary a month later about his worry that he would contract Covid after attending a large gathering where vaccination was reportedly required to attend.
In a Nov. 17, 2021, entry, Fauci detailed attending a “book party” for ABC News hack Jonathan Karl‘s new Trump book the night prior. In self-aggrandizing fashion, he bemoaned having to remove his mask for “2/3 of the time” to take photos and greet his adoring fans and said that they “treat[ed] [him] like Elvis Presley.”
It was after this party that the vaccinated Fauci detailed his anxiousness about catching Covid after being at such a large gathering.
“When I went home that night I was nervous all night looking at the ceiling concerned about having gotten infected in that very crowded restaurant despite the fact that vaccination proof was required to get in. I’m well aware that many people who are vaccinated are still getting infected and that worried me a lot,” Fauci wrote. “I’m supposed to go to an even bigger black tie affair at the home of the French ambassador tomorrow. I think I am going to cancel out since I don’t want to go through the nerve-wracking experience that I did last night worrying about having gotten infected.”
Gain of Function Research
While speaking before Congress in spring 2021, Fauci reportedly told lawmakers that the National Institutes of Health — which NIAID is part of — “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” As Federalist Senior Contributor Helen Raleigh previously reported, however, the nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance sent “more than half a million dollars’ worth of U.S. government grants [from 2014-2020], including those from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with Anthony Fauci’s approval, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to conduct gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.”
Despite his denials, Fauci seemed to acknowledge in his diary that gain-of-function research was taking place in Wuhan. In what appears to be a summary of a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with U.S. and foreign government health officials, Fauci noted that “Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain-of-function] GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor. …”
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