Anthony Fauci privately cast President Donald Trump as the chief culprit behind rising public suspicion that COVID-19 may have originated from a Wuhan laboratory that received U.S. funding for risky coronavirus experiments, according to newly released diary entries.
The pages, made public Wednesday by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, cover Faucis personal notes from December 2021 through May 2022 and offer an unusually candid look at how the longtime federal health official sought to shape the narrative around the pandemics origins. As reported by Western Journal, the documents reveal a man far more preoccupied with political blame-shifting and reputation management than with reckoning honestly with the implications of U.S.-backed research in China.
The diary entries capture Fauci at a moment when his preferred explanation that the virus emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan was steadily losing credibility. By late 2021, scientists, independent journalists and congressional investigators pressing the so-called lab leak theory had pushed past Big Tech censorship, institutional stonewalling and professional intimidation within the scientific establishment.
Fauci repeatedly used the diary to sketch out themes for his forthcoming memoir, signaling that he viewed the book as his vehicle to set the story straight. Rather than grappling with his long-standing advocacy of gain-of-function research experiments that deliberately enhance viruses transmissibility or lethality in the lab he framed the lab-leak hypothesis as a partisan weapon wielded by Trump and his allies.
Very important issue to discuss in the book. The entire controversy with China as the source of the outbreak and the lab leak theory stems from the tension between Trump and China, Fauci wrote on March 21, 2022. In that telling, public concern about a possible laboratory accident in Wuhan was not a legitimate question about biosafety and U.S. oversight, but a byproduct of diplomatic friction and domestic politics.
Fauci specifically faulted Trump for ordering the termination of a National Institutes of Health grant from Faucis own institute to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that hunted for novel coronaviruses and conducted high-risk experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Please remember that when it was brought to the attention of Trump that the NIH was funding a grant at Wuhan where the outbreak was first recognized, Trump ordered, with no evidence to support any suspicion, that we cancel the grant, Fauci wrote.
Despite Faucis insistence that the move was baseless, subsequent events have undercut his defense of EcoHealth. Four years later, EcoHealth President Peter Daszak was formally debarred by the Biden administrations Department of Health and Human Services, which said it acted to protect the public interest after mounting evidence of lax biosafety practices and shifting explanations to federal regulators about a delayed grant report covering the critical period just before the outbreak.
Fauci acknowledged in his diary that federal officials had imposed conditions on EcoHealth that they essentially were not able to meet. An official in the office of NIH Director Francis Collins Faucis superior, with whom he sometimes clashed had demanded that Daszak produce detailed records on the Wuhan labs NIH-funded coronavirus collections and the high-risk experiments conducted there.
According to Fauci, that basic request for accountability triggered a political and media firestorm that turned Daszak into a symbol of alleged scientific misconduct. This led both to the deomization [sic] of Peter Dascak [sic] of EcoHealth and to an emergence of the theory of a lab leak and clouded the picture of our ability to further investigate the very likely cause of the outbreak which was a natural jumping of virus from an animal species to human, he wrote.
At the very moment the original grant was being terminated in 2020, Faucis institute quietly awarded EcoHealth a new grant, effectively softening the blow and reducing Daszaks incentive to press the Wuhan Institute of Virology for full transparency. Emails later obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic show that Daszak never explicitly demanded lab notebooks or comprehensive records from his Chinese partners, instead merely notifying Wuhan virologist Shi Zhengli that NIH had asked for information.
Fauci also cast himself as a political casualty of the Trump era, suggesting that his bureaucratic role made him a natural target for conservatives skeptical of the official COVID narrative. Because I am the director of NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and was involved in somewhat of a conflict publicly with Trump, I then became the focal point of the building conspiracy theory that somehow or other NIH played a role in the outbreak, he said.
The factual record surrounding EcoHealths activities, however, raises serious questions that go far beyond partisan rhetoric. The organization exported 11,000 viral samples from Chinas Yunnan Province where some of the closest known relatives of the COVID-19 virus circulate in bats to Wuhan, the eventual epicenter of the pandemic, with no clear safeguards to ensure the material could not be diverted for bioweapons purposes and would remain accessible to the U.S. government.
An NIH employee stated in 2024 that EcoHealth had indeed underwritten gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan, directly contradicting years of assurances from Fauci and other officials that no such work had been funded. That admission dovetails with a 2018 grant proposal EcoHealth co-authored to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DEFUSE, alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, which called for generating engineered coronaviruses bearing the same unusual genomic features later identified in the COVID-19 virus.
When a detailed investigative report on the DEFUSE proposal surfaced in January 2022, Fauci dismissed it in his diary with a single contemptuous word: nothingburger. That casual brush-off, juxtaposed with the gravity of the underlying research, underscores how determined he was to minimize any line of inquiry that might implicate U.S. funding streams or his own policy choices in the chain of events leading to the pandemic.
Taken together, the newly disclosed diary entries paint a portrait of a powerful public health official who viewed legitimate scrutiny of U.S.-backed research in China as a political nuisance to be managed, not a moral obligation to taxpayers and the millions harmed by COVID-19. While Fauci continued to insist that a natural spillover from animals to humans remained the very likely cause of the outbreak, his private writings reveal a sustained effort to blame Trump, shield EcoHealth and downplay evidence that pointed uncomfortably toward the Wuhan lab and the risky experiments Washington helped bankroll.
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