Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate committee hearing on the federal response to monkeypox in September 2022. Fauci will appear before a different Senate committee on Wednesday to answer questions about the origins of COVID-19. Drew Angerer/Getty Images hide title toggle title Drew Angerer/Getty Images Just released diary entries Republican
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate committee hearing on the federal response to monkeypox in September 2022. Fauci will appear before a different Senate committee on Wednesday to answer questions about the origins of COVID-19.
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Just released diary entries Republican lawmakers say they were written by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist during the COVID-19 pandemic, chronicling Fauci’s daily life between December 2019 and December 2022.
The more than 1,100 pages of entries cover the final years of his tenure as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He retired in December 2022.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., posted the documents over the weekend, took them down Monday night and reposted them Tuesday morning with redacted edits. Paul also published a “prequel“, a collection of Fauci documents that include records and email exchanges between 2001 and 2015.
This was all ahead of Wednesday’s Senate hearing, where Fauci will testify.
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Debate that will not diminish
The hearing follows years of debate over the origins of the pandemic and whether the virus that causes COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory.
Paul chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and cited Fauci as the latest step in the pair’s public disagreement over the origins of the coronavirus.
in a thread in X Over the weekend, Paul wrote that diary entries show that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
A Fauci spokesperson sent a document fact-checking Paul’s claims and a letter written by Fauci’s legal team to Paul last month. In that letter, Fauci’s lawyers wrote that Paul was waging a “years-long public crusade” against Fauci.
“You are obsessed with seeing Dr. Fauci prosecuted for imaginary crimes, and you are so interested in that outcome that you have created a personal brand around it,” says the letter, which NPR reviewed.
Paul did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment in time for publication. It is also unclear how Paul obtained the documents from Fauci’s diary, although a video published on Tuesday in X of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., mentions having extracted them “from 11 separate servers.”
What Fauci’s notes reveal
At first glance, Fauci’s notes show him grappling with his growing fame: including references to new security details, police surveilling his home, celebrity encounters and “becoming an international celebrity himself.” The notes have sentence fragments and typos from someone quickly recording their thoughts.
“A big front-page article about me appeared in the Washington Post,” Fauci writes on May 21, 2020. “Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and truly unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable people in the world.”
But the entries also show Fauci reacting with growing alarm to the case count and death toll and grappling with questions about how the virus spread.
Consensus for natural origin
The current scientific consensus is that the virus is probably of natural origin. That means many scientists believe the available data suggests that COVID-19 began when someone in China was infected by an animal carrying the virus.
However, another theory popular among some researchers and President Donald Trump suggests that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spread from a Chinese government laboratory in Wuhan that was working on bat coronaviruses.
Paul alleges that Fauci’s notes show that he covered up evidence supporting this “lab leak” theory.
On Paul’s website, he points to Fauci’s entry from February 1, 2020, detailing a conference call between Fauci and prominent scientists.
In his notes, Fauci writes that there was “not complete agreement” on the origins of the virus during the call.
However, later in his entries, Fauci writes that he “is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, although… I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak” and “that just because two alternatives are possible does not mean they are equally likely.”
Many scientists say this thought process reflects how their consensus changed as understanding of COVID-19 evolved.
Felicia Goodrum, a virologist at Dartmouth College who spoke to NPR on Monday from the American Society of Virology meeting in Minneapolis, says questions in the early days of the pandemic about the lab leak were “normal scientific questions,” when scientists knew very little about how the virus spread.
“I think that’s what we recognize Fauci was doing, that of course there are a lot of unanswered questions,” he said of the early days of the pandemic. Now, however, he says those questions are presented as “a kind of guilt signal that they knew this was happening.”
Gigi Gronvallbiosafety expert and immunologist, similarly says that these types of questions are part of scientific exploration.
“It’s not unusual for people to have a variety of opinions or think of many different theories and holes in their theories as they go along,” he says. “That’s what science is about.”
The “lab leak” theory and the “gain of function” controversy
The focus of the lab leak theory is the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Part of the current controversy has been whether an American nonprofit helped the Wuhan Institute facilitate what is known as “gain-of-function” research that some believe led to the pandemic.
This type of research involves experimenting with viruses and other pathogens in ways that give them new abilities. This can often help researchers better understand how viruses work or how they might become more dangerous or transmissible. This field has long been controversial due to the possibility of dangerous pathogens breaking out of laboratories and causing a pandemic.
The group in question was an American nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance that was researching bat coronaviruses. This included a years-long project in China, which EcoHealth led in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In late April 2020, the US government stopped financing the project.
Many experts disagreed with the decision and said the work was vital to preventing the next major coronavirus outbreak. The nonprofit’s president at the time, Dr. Peter Daszak, said ending coronavirus research posed a threat to national security and public health.
In January 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut all funding for EcoHealth and Daszak.
President Trump too restricted funding for gain-of-function research with an Executive Order in May 2025, and on Tuesday the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a policy He says he will establish greater oversight for this type of research.
What does the evidence say?
The Trump administration advanced the theory that the pandemic was caused by the virus that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Leaked State Department cables raised concerns about safety protocols at the Wuhan lab.
But as information evolved, scientists cast doubt on what became known as the lab leak theory. NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel and Emily Kwong spoke with 10 outstanding scientists In 2020 everyone believed that the virus was transmitted from animals to humans. They said that their virus analysis It showed no signs of human genetic modification and was infecting people in a way scientists had never seen before, making laboratory engineering unlikely.
The following year, in February 2021, a joint investigation between China and the World Health Organization (WHO) also concluded that COVID-19 probably started in bats and reached humans through another animal.
However, at the time, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticized the report, saying the team had not done enough work to completely rule out the lab leak theory.
US government agencies continued to investigate the origins of the pandemic in the following years.
In August 2021, US intelligence agencies failed to reach a firm conclusion – and remained divided over the origins of COVID-19.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded, “with little confidence,” that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory leak. This was in direct conflict with many scientists who study the origins of pandemics, who said much of the evidence still pointed to a natural origin.
A Republican-led select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic concluded in December 2024 that a laboratory leak was the most likely explanation for SARS-CoV-2. They also suggested that NIH funding contributed to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A call to open minds and preparation
Some scientists say there is simply not enough information to reach a firm conclusion about how the outbreak began.
“In my opinion, it is important to continue investigating this question with an open mind while taking proactive measures to minimize the risks of future zoonotic and research-related outbreaks,” said the evolutionary virologist. Jesse Bloom he wrote in an email to NPR.
Goodrum says focusing on Fauci’s stance can erode public trust in the investigation.
“I think they’re trying to sow distrust in science and scientists,” he says.
She says many virologists are concerned that funding cuts and ongoing tension over the pandemic’s origins are already hampering research focused on preventing the next pandemic.
“We’re less safe. We’re less prepared for a pandemic right now than we were in 2019,” Goodrum says. “And this is terrifying for all of us.”
Joseph Kim contributed to this report.
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