Anthony Fauci’s newly released diary raises a deeply uncomfortable question: how much of what the public was told about Covid actually reflected what Fauci privately believed? One of the clearest examples concerns the virus’s fatality rate. In February 2020, Fauci recorded a conversation with former CDC director Tom Frieden in which they agreed that the case fatality rate was “more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%”. Yet publicly, Fauci was still warning Americans that Covid had a mortality rate of around 2 to 2.5%, later saying it was probably closer to 1%. The distinction between a case fatality rate and an infection fatality rate matters, and the figures were necessarily uncertain at such an early stage, but the problem is the enormous gulf between Fauci’s private assessment and the much more alarming numbers being presented publicly. The diary also records Fauci describing Covid as behaving like “a bad influenza”, while his public messaging increasingly emphasised the extraordinary danger posed by the virus.
The contradictions do not stop there. Fauci later repeatedly claimed that he had not been responsible for school closures, yet his March 15, 2020 diary entry records him saying that he had “convinced” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools, based partly on what Fauci had been saying publicly, and that he had also urged the closure of bars and restaurants. He recorded a similar conversation involving California, where he wrote that the governor’s chief of staff said Gavin Newsom had decided to close schools, bars and restaurants after Fauci’s television appearances. Then there is the question of Covid’s origins. On January 26, 2020, Fauci privately wrote that the Wuhan market “was not the source” but “the amplifier”, while also writing that the virus had jumped from animals to humans somewhere. Yet the public debate that followed saw Fauci strongly associated with the natural-origin explanation and dismissals of the possibility of a laboratory origin. Taken individually, some of these differences can be explained by changing evidence and evolving scientific understanding. Taken together, however, the diary creates a very awkward picture of a senior public-health official whose private assessments, recollections and public messaging did not always line up. That is precisely why these records deserve serious scrutiny rather than being dismissed as merely political ammunition.
