Fauci Diary Entries Show He Doubted Wet-Market Origin in January 2020, Weeks Before Backing It Publicly

Since Fauci's diaries first surfaced through Rand Paul's Senate Homeland Security Committee reporting on the Caputo and Meadows feuds detailed Sunday, a second batch of material from the same document dump has landed: the diary's actual content on COVID's origins, released on Paul's "The Reading Room" webpage. The timing is not an accident. Fauci is scheduled to testify before Paul's committee on Wednesday, and the entries are already reshaping what lawmakers plan to ask him.

The core problem for Fauci is a single line from January 26, 2020. In his own handwriting, contemporaneously recorded and never meant for public release, Fauci wrote: "Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier." He added that "somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans," according to entries reported by both the Daily Signal and independent researcher Maryanne Demasi.

That single sentence undercuts two years of public messaging. The Wuhan wet market was the dominant origin theory for most of 2020, and Fauci was one of its most visible defenders. In a May 2020 interview with National Geographic, he said the scientific evidence was "very, very strongly leaning" toward natural evolution and dismissed the idea the virus was engineered. His own diary shows he'd already concluded the market wasn't the source four months earlier.

The February 1 phone call

Five days after that entry, on January 31, 2020, Fauci recorded a call with Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar, who had just consulted virologists Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, and Bob Garry about the newly sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genome. According to Fauci's own notes, the scientists found the genome "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory," specifically flagging the virus's furin cleavage site as something that "could not have occurred naturally." Fauci wrote that the scientists raised the possibility the virus "could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab."

Days later, on February 1, Fauci convened a call with twelve scientists to discuss the virus's origins. Paul's office says the diary shows only two of the twelve concluded the virus was natural; Fauci wrote that "the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible." That call is widely understood to have produced the "Proximal Origin" paper, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, which concluded a lab origin was improbable and became the scientific anchor for dismissing the lab-leak theory for the next year.

A gap that size, twelve scientists on a call and only two backing the natural-origin conclusion that later became the public consensus paper, raises obvious questions about how a 2-in-12 split became a confident public paper dismissing the lab-leak theory. These are Fauci's own contemporaneous characterizations of what other scientists said on a call. The diary is Fauci's account, not a transcript, and the scientists on that call (Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and others) have previously said their published conclusions reflected their genuine scientific judgment, not political pressure. That said, the numbers Fauci himself recorded require explanation.

Credit-taking on lockdowns

The diary also undercuts Fauci's public claims about his own role in school and business closures. Independent journalist Matt Orfalea flagged a late-2022 ABC interview in which Fauci said he had "nothing to do" with closing schools. But Fauci's own March 15, 2020 entry describes calling then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and "convincing him" to close NYC schools, bars, and restaurants based on Fauci's TV appearances. The same entry describes a parallel call with Ann O'Leary, chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom, in which O'Leary reportedly told Fauci that Newsom decided to close California schools based on Fauci's television comments.

Elsewhere, the diary shows Fauci reprinting flattering press coverage of himself, including a May 21, 2020 entry gloating over a "very flattering" Washington Post front-page profile, according to the Daily Signal.

What's disputed and what isn't

The market-was-the-amplifier line and the 2-of-12 breakdown on the origin call are both drawn directly from Fauci's own written words, not third-party allegations. What remains unproven is intent: whether Fauci knowingly misled the public in later interviews or simply changed his assessment as more information came in over 2020. No charges, indictments, or formal findings of perjury have been announced against Fauci over these statements. The diary shows what he wrote privately; it does not by itself prove he lied rather than reconsidered.

Fauci is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs. Expect the January 26 market entry and the February 1 call numbers to be the two documents lawmakers press him on directly, given that his January 2024 House testimony included more than 100 instances of "I don't recall" on origin-related questions.