The diaries are shocking. All of us have feet of clay, and it is too much to focus all my rage on a scumbag liar who is testifying in a massively important Senate hearing today. I am going to explain why Fauci matters so much in a time when people are waking up to the lies and lack of consequences for Fauci and for everyone involved in mass death from a lab. Politicians who took away freedoms for no valid reason. Pastors who are the most accountable before God, who said “trust the science” while repeating lies that in real time many of us were pointing out were not scientific at all.
Fauci has not apologized for lying. An apology is not enough. Taxpayers are still funding a pension for a man who did more to erode public trust in public health than anyone else in my lifetime. You roll your eyes at people who believe conspiracies? You are saddened that good medical advice from trusted doctors is ignored? Focus your ire on these facts, our civilization experienced a massive crisis, and we now know that the people tasked to lead us are the reason the crisis existed in the first place, and lied about it and how to deal with it over and over with the suppor that bordered on religious fervor of a media that has all the discernment when it comes to scientific questions of a 2 year screaming at everyone to believe in Santa.
For three years, we were told the man was a saint. He was Time’s Person of the Year material before Time even ran the poll. He had bobbleheads made in his image. He had prayer candles sold with his face on them, and I am not speaking in metaphor. He told you to close your church. He told you to skip your father’s funeral. He told you to keep your children out of school for a year, maybe two, and if you asked why the science kept changing, you were a threat to public health. Some of you lost jobs over him. Some of you lost the last conversation you would ever have with a parent because a hospital enforced his guidance at the door. And when you said, quietly, that something didn’t add up, you were called a conspiracy theorist by the same media that now cannot find airtime to cover what his own diary says in his own handwriting.
This week, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diary became public. Senator Rand Paul released more than a thousand pages of it, spanning December 2019 through December 2022, days before Fauci is compelled by subpoena to sit before the Senate again on Wednesday. I have spent a good bit of time being stunned the last two days going through what is in it, along with the record that came before it. Here is what you need to know before you watch him either come clean today in Senate testimony, or lie under oath yet again. You deserve to know what he already told the truth about in private, while he was lying over and over in the most prominent public places.
What He Wrote When He Thought No One Was Watching
On January 26, 2020, weeks before most Americans had heard the words “novel coronavirus,” Fauci wrote in his own diary that the Wuhan wet market was not the source of the outbreak. It was, in his words, “the amplifier.” Not the origin. The amplifier. That is worth sitting with. While the public was being told for months afterward that the virus jumped from an animal at a market, and while anyone who suggested a lab was involved was being removed from social media platforms and mocked on cable news, the nation’s top infectious disease official had already written down, privately, that the market story didn’t hold.
A week later, on February 1, 2020, he documented a conference call with a dozen leading scientists. The subject was whether the virus showed signs of deliberate genetic insertion, a marker of laboratory manipulation. Only two of the twelve scientists on that call concluded the virus was natural in origin. That call produced the now-infamous “Proximal Origin” paper, the piece of research that was used for years afterward to publicly dismiss the lab leak theory as fringe, unscientific, even racist. Fauci’s own diary shows that behind the paper’s confident public conclusion was a room full of scientists who were genuinely divided, and that he knew it.
In 2021, under oath before the Senate, Fauci testified that his agency had never funded gain of function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That denial has been the center of a five year fight ever since, one that will occupy most of Wednesday’s hearing. You do not need me to tell you which way the diary points. A man does not write “the market was not the source” in January 2020 and then spend the next two years insisting in public that the market question was settled science, unless he has decided that what he privately knows and what he is able to admit because of his own actions are two very different things.
There is one entry, dated August 13, 2022, that may be the most damning page in the entire collection, because it requires no interpretation at all.
Fauci writes about what he calls “more drama” involving the CDC and then director Rochelle Walensky. By his own account, he and several colleagues had pushed the CDC to walk back a statement it was preparing to make publicly: that the COVID vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission. The colleagues he names are Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Steve Cha, who served as counselor to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and, to some extent, David Kessler, the chief science officer of the White House COVID Response Team. This was not one man’s private doubt. This was a coordinated group of senior federal health officials agreeing among themselves to keep the public from hearing the plain version of what they knew. He then explains why, in his own words, on his own page. That statement, if released as originally written, would conflict with the push to get people to take the updated bivalent booster that September. It would also undermine the Department of Justice’s efforts to enforce vaccine mandates.
Read that again slowly. The objection was never that the statement was false. Fauci’s own diary concedes it was closer to accurate than the alternative. The objection was that a true statement, at that particular moment, was politically and legally inconvenient. So the CDC agreed to soften the language on its public website, from “not effective at all” to “modest and waning” efficacy. But the underlying scientific report, the one doctors and researchers actually rely on, still carried the more direct language, and when colleagues close to Fauci noticed the two documents didn’t match, one of them reportedly called him in an agitated state, called it “the last straw,” and predicted Walensky would be fired the moment the White House chief of staff returned from vacation.
This is not a dispute over ambiguous data. This is a written record of federal health officials deciding, deliberately, that the public should hear a softened version of the truth because the accurate version would complicate a legal mandate already imposed on millions of Americans who had no say in the matter. If you took that vaccine believing it would stop you from spreading the virus to your grandmother, and the men overseeing the message already knew internally that the claim was, at best, “modest and waning,” you are right to be furious.
The vaccine language episode was not an isolated lapse. It was the pattern.
In May 2021, Rochelle Walensky changed the CDC’s mask guidance for vaccinated Americans. Fauci recorded the moment with unusual candor: “She will take my advice… I’m very pleased that she listened to me.” Then he wrote the part that mattered. The public was being told this was independent science. Fauci knew otherwise, and said so to himself: “The radical right-wing maniacs who blamed me for the rigidity of the CDC recommendations will probably not realize at all that it was me that triggered this change.”
Four months later, in September 2021, the CDC’s own independent vaccine advisory committee did something inconvenient. It voted 9 to 6 against recommending boosters for at-risk workers, the exact outcome the White House did not want. Fauci’s diary records what happened next as plainly as a business memo. He, the Surgeon General, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, and an outside political operative worked the phones that night. Fauci texted Walensky directly and, in his own words, “begged her to override” her own committee’s vote. She called him back after midnight. By morning, the recommendation had been reversed. His entry: “Rochelle listened to me. She overruled the recommendation of the ACIP.” He praised her for finally showing “clear leadership.”
An advisory committee exists to be independent of the person it is advising. This diary shows that when independence produced the wrong answer, it was simply overridden by a late night phone call, and the man who orchestrated it wrote himself a note of congratulations for it. If you ever wondered why the public health guidance during COVID felt less like settled science and more like a message being managed, here is the memo where the management is described in the manager’s own hand.
The Diary of a Man in Love With Himself
Here is what surprised even Fauci’s longtime critics. It was not just the origins material. It was the sheer volume of entries, day after day, tracking not the dead, but the praise.
March 4, 2020. One hundred and eight cases in the United States. Ten deaths. Fauci’s entry that day is not about the deaths. It is about “much praise for me,” after a flattering profile ran in Politico, and about interns and White House staff lining up to ask him for selfies.
March 15, 2020. “BIG DAY,” he wrote, after appearing on all five Sunday shows in a single morning, what he called his third “Fauci 5.” The case count that day was rising fast. His diary entry is a scoreboard of his own media saturation.
May 21, 2020. Global deaths near ten thousand. His entry: a front page Washington Post profile, “very flattering.” Two days later, he wrote that the White House was reportedly upset he was outshining the President.
After the 2020 election, when deaths under the new administration climbed higher than they had under the old one, Fauci grew noticeably less diligent about recording the death toll. He did not, however, grow less diligent about recording the praise. Barbra Streisand sent a note. Julia Roberts called him her personal hero. Celebrities gathered on video to sing to him for his eightieth birthday. The Bidens sent cookies from the White House basement with a note that read, “You are our hero.” By 2022, he was noting his fifty eighth honorary doctorate.
Separately, Senator Paul’s office released records showing that scientists who had received millions of dollars in NIH grants under Fauci’s direction were nominating him for cash prizes, some of them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, one foreign prize alone worth nine hundred thousand. Fauci’s own taxpayer funded staff helped write the nomination letters. The man who told the country to sacrifice, to shutter, to stay home and stay silent, was building a personal trophy case funded in part by the very grant recipients he oversaw.
Scripture has a name for this condition, and it was written three thousand years before Fauci kept a diary. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs did not need to know his name to describe his affliction.
The Friends in the Press
Then there is the matter of the press he was supposedly being held accountable by. Finley Peter Dunne wrote the phrase as satire that in the muckraking era became famous as a key to the role of the press, that they should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. An obvious reason trust in media is at all time lows? They do the opposite.
Fauci’s diary documents a warm, ongoing relationship with CNN’s Jake Tapper that goes well past the normal boundary between a journalist and a source. Dinners at the Tapper family home in Washington. Phone calls. Text exchanges. In one entry, Fauci notes that he handed Tapper questions ahead of an interview Tapper was about to conduct with a Trump administration health official, questions meant to press that official on testing failures. In another, Fauci records that after his own contentious CNN interview, Tapper personally called to make sure the appearance hadn’t caused Fauci any trouble with the White House. That is not journalism. That is public relations with a press badge.
And here is the detail that ought to embarrass CNN most of all. The very same weeks that Fauci was telling the country to skip its holiday gatherings and cancel its funerals, he was, by his own written account, dining at the Tappers’ home. “Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC,” he wrote in 2020. “Terrific couple. Friendship building.” Later that year, days before a presidential election, another entry: “Had dinner at my home with Jake and Jennifer Tapper. Relaxed, good time.” The rules, it turns out, were for you.
CNN’s Dana Bash texted Fauci after a heated exchange with a Republican congressman to tell him he was “a better man.” When a reporter at The Atlantic suggested Fauci had been embarrassed by a canceled interview, Fauci’s private response was two words, unprintable in a Sunday school class, directed at the reporter by name. This was not adversarial journalism holding power accountable. This was friends protecting a friend, while the friend held the power to close your business and your church.
Before he left office, President Biden issued Anthony Fauci a preemptive pardon. Not a pardon for a specific crime he had been convicted of. A pardon for anything he might be prosecuted for, before any charge had even been filed, because the outgoing administration was concerned about what the incoming one might uncover.
I want you to sit with that for a moment as a matter of simple logic, set theology aside entirely. Innocent men do not typically require pardons for crimes that have not yet been alleged. You do not insure against a fire that you are certain will never start. Somebody, at the highest levels of the outgoing government, believed there was enough exposure here to warrant blanket legal cover before the exposure could even be named. That is not proof of a specific crime. But it is, at minimum, an admission that someone with access to far more information than you or I have judged the risk to be real.
Today, July 29th, Anthony Fauci will sit under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the same body he has sparred with for years, chaired by the same senator he has spent half a decade publicly dismissing. He will be asked, again, whether his agency funded the research that may have caused a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans. He will be asked why what he wrote privately about the market not being the source contradicts what his agency insisted publicly for years. He will be asked about the diary, the dinners, the awards, the softened vaccine language, the overridden advisory committee, and the pardon he did not need if he had nothing to answer for.
I do not know what he will say. Men who have spent fifty years being worshipped by sycophants do not repent easily, and Fauci’s own diary shows a man who, even in private, seemed more interested in cataloguing his admirers than confronting his conscience. But I want to say something to those of you who spoke the truth about this back in 2021, when it cost you something to say it. Some of you were called conspiracy theorists at your own dinner table. Some of you lost friends over it. Some of you were mocked from pulpits that should have known better than to trust a bureaucrat’s word over a shepherd’s discernment.
You were right. Not eventually right, not technically right on a technicality. Right when it counted, when the cost of being right was real and the reward for being right was nothing but scorn. That is what courage usually looks like. It rarely gets applauded in the moment. It gets vindicated later, quietly, in a diary entry the man never intended you to read.
Elijah thought he was the last one standing. God told him there were seven thousand who had not bowed the knee. There were more of you than you knew, standing quietly, unwilling to bow to a man who was, by his own hand, recording his own glory while the rest of the country buried its dead.
It is worth looking back. If you were deceived by Fauci, it is okay to acknowledge that, and also okay to question those who were not so that you can grow in discernment. Those who were wrong, who tried to rule you based on lies, who demonstrated an inability to keep up with data enough to ascertain truth when it was required of their role, should not be trusted to lead. Much of the “establishment” across politics, public health and the pastorate do not want a reckoning of where they stood during COVID. We need a full accounting of what Fauci did, but he should just be the start.
The truth does not always arrive on time. But it arrives.
Clayton Wood is a Knoxville lawyer and pastor and is a Contributing Writer for TriStar Daily.
