WASHINGTON – Three days before Dr. Anthony Fauci co-signed a paper declaring that COVID-19 had most likely emerged from a natural animal spillover, his pandemic diary recorded that ten of twelve scientists on a private call believed deliberate genetic insertion was possible. Senator Rand Paul’s committee published the 1,141-page diary Saturday, took it down Monday, and posted it again Tuesday with portions redacted. Dr. Fauci is scheduled to testify before the Senate Wednesday morning.
The diary’s February 1, 2020, entry is the most consequential section. Fauci convened an emergency call of international virologists four days after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency. His notes record that only two of twelve scientists supported a natural spillover origin. The other ten, including prominent researchers who later publicly co-authored the influential natural-origin paper in Nature Medicine, told the call that deliberate insertion remained possible. The specific language Fauci wrote was: “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”
Five days before that call, on January 26, 2020, the diary shows Fauci writing that the Wuhan wet market “was not the source, it was the amplifier.” That distinction, between the site where the outbreak spread rapidly and the place where the virus first crossed into humans, is one that Fauci’s subsequent public messaging did not always draw with the same precision.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs, obtained the diary through a subpoena filed June 23 after months of negotiation, as Semafor reported, and a court order compelling Fauci’s compliance. The 1,141 pages cover January 2020 through Fauci’s resignation from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December 2022. They were published Saturday in full, disappeared from the committee’s website Monday morning, attributed to “unexpected technical issues” by the committee’s communications office, and appeared again Tuesday with black redaction marks over passages the committee and Fauci’s lawyers have not described.
The redacted Tuesday version includes August 2021 entries in which Fauci expressed frustration with what he described as “conspiracy theory like letters” from congressional members pressing for a laboratory leak investigation. By that point, those members included Paul himself, who had spent eighteen months publicly demanding the kind of investigation the diary confirms was never initiated from inside the public health apparatus.
Named in the diary’s February 2020 entries are virologists Felicia Goodrum of Dartmouth and Robert Garry of Tulane, both participants in the private call and both later co-authors of the Nature Medicine paper published March 17, 2020. That paper concluded the virus “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” The discrepancy between what the paper stated and what the diary records the call participants privately said that same week is the core of what Paul intends to explore at Wednesday’s hearing.
The Republican investigation into COVID origins, launched in the House in 2023, previously established that NIH grants had reached the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. Fauci’s 2021 congressional testimony maintained that no gain-of-function research was conducted with those funds. The diary is not the first document to challenge that account, but it is the most contemporaneous record of Fauci’s private thinking that Congress has been able to secure.
Wednesday’s hearing at SD-342 begins at 8:30 a.m. Paul is expected to ask Fauci directly why the public messaging on COVID origins shifted so quickly from uncertainty to confidence in natural spillover if the private scientific assessment, documented in the diary, remained so divided. Democratic members of the committee have signaled they will contest the framing, arguing that the diary entries reflect appropriate scientific caution under pressure, not deliberate concealment.
What the diary does not resolve is the underlying question of whether COVID-19 originated in a laboratory or in a market. The entries document what Fauci knew and when he knew it; they do not prove the virus was engineered. The distinction matters legally and scientifically even as it is likely to be blurred in the hearing’s political dynamics.
Fauci, 86, has not made a public statement since the diary’s release Saturday. His lawyers said he would comply with the subpoena but offered no elaboration. Paul’s Senate committee has used its platform aggressively this year, including a contentious confirmation hearing in March where Paul challenged Trump’s DHS nominee in a personal confrontation that drew national coverage. The Fauci hearing represents a different kind of moment: a years-long effort to compel documentary accountability from an official who retired before the investigation could be completed.
Whether the diary’s most significant discrepancies survive the redaction process will determine how much new factual ground Wednesday’s hearing can cover. The February 1 entries, if confirmed as accurately represented in the Saturday version, establish a documented private scientific consensus that the public never saw while it was forming. The redactions introduced Tuesday cover unspecified passages, and neither Paul’s office nor Fauci’s lawyers has confirmed whether the February 1 material was among them.
What Congress has, and what the public currently does not, are the 1,141 pages as they were published Saturday. What happens Wednesday morning depends on which version the committee chooses to enter into the record.
