The Revealing Diaries of Dr. FauciNewly released diaries tell a different story from what he told you.
By The Editorial Board
July 27, 2026 5:47 pm ET
Anthony Fauci made himself the public face of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, and now we have a glimpse of what was going on behind his eyes. Newly released diaries paint an unflattering portrait of a self-obsessed and not entirely honest bureaucrat, in contrast to the image of the careful scientist he cultivated in public.
The documents were released by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who for years has dug into the Covid story to understand why the government response to the health crisis was so destructive. The excerpts Sen. Paul has published, which run to more than 1,100 pages, cover December 2019 just before the first reports of an outbreak in Wuhan, China, through Dr. Fauci’s retirement from government in December 2022.
The diary reads as if it was intended to be an aide-mémoire for an autobiography Dr. Fauci might write one day, so it pays to read with care. He might have shaded the truth with an eye (or two) on history. Yet that possibility makes what’s in it all the more remarkable.
One conclusion is that on important points Dr. Fauci was both wrong and dishonest. For instance, he and allies in the government-science industrial complex still cling to the theory that Covid-19 evolved naturally in animal populations before spreading to humans.
Yet on Feb. 1, 2020, his diary records a meeting with a dozen prominent virologists in which only two credited this “natural origins” theory. The rest suspected the virus might have been created artificially, not least because a leading scientist in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, was known to engage in the sort of gain-of-function research that could produce such a result.
The diary suggests that by Jan. 26, 2020, Dr. Fauci believed the virus hadn’t originated in the Wuhan wet market, often identified as the source by natural-origin advocates. This didn’t stop him and allies from painting skeptics of the natural-origin theory as politicized cranks and conspiracy theorists. Previously released documents shed light on how Dr. Fauci orchestrated publication of a scientific paper to suppress the theory that Covid leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The diary also brags on Dr. Fauci’s influence persuading the likes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut schools and lock down large parts of the economy. Yet he later claimed in public that he never argued for locking anything down.
Liberals lionize Dr. Fauci now for his antagonism toward President Trump. But early in the pandemic the diary suggests the doctor was besotted with Mr. Trump—mainly, it appears, because Mr. Trump said nice things about him. He’s similarly susceptible to the flattery of celebrities.
Conversely, Dr. Fauci gloated to himself about his viciousness toward critics. July 14, 2020, saw him trying to quash a skeptical memo about his policies by Journal contributor Stephen Moore. “I told [White House aide Alyssa Farah] that the White House (either Meadows or the POTUS) need to shut up Stephen Moore and stop his publication of ‘Dr. Wrong’ paper. If he does not the entire academic community will dump all over the POTUS.”
He attempted to freeze lockdown skeptics out of policy-making roles. He refers to Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, authors of the lockdown-critical Great Barrington Declaration, as “the 3 stooges.”
The most embarrassing entries relate Dr. Fauci’s fixation with his own press coverage. He makes a note of his many interviews, and a positive newspaper profile can garner as much mention in the diary as the important scientific and policy debates of that day.
The media idolatry is something to behold—and may be one reason that most of the press will ignore the diaries. They incriminate the press in Dr. Fauci’s deceptions. “Amazing profile of me today on Nightline,” he writes at one point. “Multiple editorials (print news Washington Post, etc.) and opinion pieces (Newsweek) written about me. Cannot keep up or even read all of them. Country needs someone to look up in the face of Trump presidency.”
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All of which points to a larger lesson still unlearned from the Covid debacle. The doctor of the diaries comes across as all too human—stubborn, biased, vain and vindictive. Yet the media and most of the political class treated him as a Solomonic sage, the perfect technocrat capable of managing all of society.
The Covid record shows that his advice was often wrong, and in the case of the lockdowns catastrophically so. This is why voters increasingly rebel against rule by “experts.” After reading the Fauci diaries, the real question is why we’d ever allow such a person to rule over us in that way again.
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