Fauci’s Secret Diaries: The Private Ego That Cost America

Sen. Rand Paul has done the country a service. By releasing more than 1,100 pages of Anthony Fauci’s near-daily private diaries from December 2019 through his retirement in 2022, the Kentucky Republican has peeled back the carefully cultivated public image of the COVID-era doctor and revealed the man underneath.

What emerges is not the steady, selfless scientist sold to the American people night after night. It is a portrait of a man intoxicated by sudden fame, carefully tracking every flattering profile, celebrity call, and piece of merchandise bearing his likeness while the nation he was supposed to protect endured historic disruption. The gap between what Fauci wrote privately and what he told the public is not a minor inconsistency. It is a betrayal of trust that helped impose policies whose human and economic costs are still being paid.

<<<<<<<Download the Fauci Diary here>>>>>>>

In March and May 2020, as American deaths climbed and schools and businesses shuttered, Fauci recorded his own rising celebrity with something approaching glee. “The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable,” he wrote. “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world.” He noted front-page Washington Post pieces, New York Times columns, Atlantic profiles, invitations to Dancing with the Stars (declined), and the bizarre cultural artifacts that followed—prayer candles of “St. Fauci,” bobbleheads, doughnuts, and socks. Grandmothers with crushes made the diary. The daily death toll sometimes did too, but the press clippings received top billing.

That same private record shows Fauci taking personal credit for measures he later denied recommending. In mid-March 2020 he wrote that he “convinced” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools and urged him to shut bars and restaurants. Days later he advised the mayor to move toward a full shelter-in-place order against pushback from then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Publicly, years later, Fauci insisted he “didn’t recommend locking anything down” and had “nothing to do” with school closures. The diary tells a different story.

On the origins of the virus, the private notes are equally revealing. As early as January 26, 2020, Fauci recorded that the Huanan market “was not the source, it was the amplifier.” On a February 1 conference call with leading scientists, he noted that only two participants favored a purely natural spillover; the rest believed deliberate insertion of genetic material was possible. Yet the public messaging that followed—amplified by Fauci and the papers he helped shape—insisted the lab-leak hypothesis was a fringe conspiracy. The diaries confirm what many Americans already suspected: the scientific debate was far more open than the public was allowed to know.

<<<<<<<Download the Fauci Diary here>>>>>>

The human consequences of the policies Fauci championed and privately claimed credit for remain staggering. Learning loss for a generation of children, especially the poorest. Delayed cancer screenings and elective surgeries that cost lives. Small businesses destroyed. Churches closed while big-box stores stayed open. Mental health crises, drug overdoses, and loneliness that tore at families. The Constitution was treated as optional. Faith communities were sidelined. The same experts who demanded compliance while they ignored their own rules now face a written record of vanity and contradiction.

America is not perfect, but it remains the last best hope for ordered liberty in a dangerous world. That hope depends on truth-tellers in high places, not bureaucrats who confuse their own celebrity with the public good. Fauci’s diaries do not rewrite every scientific judgment of 2020. They do something more important: they show that the man directing much of the national response was far more focused on the mirror than on the wreckage outside it. Conservatives who questioned the lockdowns, the school closures, and the suppression of the lab-leak theory were not “anti-science.” They were defending the American people against an elite that had forgotten who it served.

The diaries are public. The damage is not theoretical. And the American people deserve leaders who fear God more than they love their own press clippings. Download it here.