His Diary Said 0.2 Percent.
He Told Congress Ten Times the Flu.
Then He Pleaded the Fifth — 111 Times.
On February 8, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote in his personal diary that COVID-19’s case fatality rate was “more like 0.2–0.3% rather than 2.0%.” Five weeks later, under oath before Congress, he put the number at roughly ten times the seasonal flu.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released 1,141 pages of that diary on July 24–27, 2026, two days before Fauci testified under subpoena on July 29. He answered by invoking the Fifth Amendment — a reported 111 times. This is the full record, 2020 to today: the origins fight, the six-feet admission, the school closures, the pardon, and Wednesday’s hearing.
- 0.2% the fatality rate Fauci's private Feb. 8, 2020 diary entry cites, vs. the '10x the flu' figure he gave Congress five weeks later — Fox News Digital
- $8.0M in NIH awards to EcoHealth Alliance an HHS Inspector General found were not effectively monitored — HHS OIG
- -8 pts the largest 8th-grade math score decline on record, set during pandemic-era school closures — NAGB/NCES
The diary entry is short. On February 8, 2020, after a call with former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden, Fauci wrote that the two men were “on the same page in thinking th[a]t this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 . . . making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%.” That is a private estimate roughly in line with a bad flu season.
What he told the public was a different number. On March 10, 2020, on Fox News’ Hannity, Fauci first cited 2–2.5% mortality before landing on “about 1%…10x more lethal than the seasonal flu.” The next day, in sworn testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, he repeated the 10x figure. He said the same thing again on The Daily Show on March 27.
“This is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility... making the case fatality rate more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%.”
Anthony Fauci · personal diary · February 8, 2020 · released by Sen. Rand Paul, July 24, 2026
NPR offers a fair caveat: the documents alone don’t establish whether Fauci treated the lower figure as settled or as one of several early estimates in a fast-moving outbreak. That context matters. It does not erase the five-week, ten-fold gap between what he wrote privately and what he swore to Congress publicly.
The fatality-rate gap is one thread. The bigger one runs back to February 1, 2020, when Fauci joined a confidential conference call organized by Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar, alongside then-NIH Director Francis Collins and virologists Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry. Fauci’s own diary entry on that call: “Only 2 concluded it was natural. The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.” Six weeks later, those same scientists published “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine, concluding there was no evidence of lab engineering — the paper that anchored the “debunked” framing of the lab-leak theory for the next two years. Slack messages the same scientists exchanged, also released by Sen. Paul’s committee this week, show one author privately calling an accidental leak “friggin’ likely.”
On funding, Fauci was direct and, it turned out, wrong. Testifying before the Senate on May 11, 2021, he told Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Paul pressed again that July; Fauci snapped back, “if anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.” Months later, NIH’s own principal deputy director told Congress in writing that EcoHealth Alliance — the NIH grantee that subawarded bat-coronavirus research to the Wuhan lab — had failed to promptly disclose an experiment result the agency “had not anticipated.” In January 2023, the HHS Inspector General went further, finding NIH failed to effectively monitor $8.0 million in EcoHealth awards, including subawards to the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself.
The government’s own intelligence agencies have since split on origin, but they’ve moved toward the lab. The FBI assessed “moderate confidence” in a lab origin (reached in 2021, disclosed in 2023); the Department of Energy separately assessed “low confidence” in a lab leak the same month. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), released its 520-page final report on December 2, 2024, concluding COVID-19 “most likely” emerged from a Wuhan lab and recommending EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, never receive federal funding again. Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) disputed the conclusion, saying Republicans “weaponized concerns about a lab-related origin…for partisan gain” without “a shred of evidence.”
On her final day as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard declassified roughly 400 pages of intelligence-community documents alleging Fauci influenced assessments to suppress the lab-leak theory and misled Congress under oath in 2024 about his contacts with intelligence officials. Independent legal analysts at Lawfare pushed back that the documents don’t prove Gabbard’s strongest claims. Read the full story: Gabbard’s Final Act Declassified the Fauci Files.
In a 14-hour transcribed interview on January 8–9, 2024, Fauci told the House Select Subcommittee that the six-foot social-distancing rule — the guidance that shaped restaurant capacity, classroom layouts, and church pews for two years — “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t “based on data or even data that could be accomplished.” He repeated the substance at a public hearing on June 3, 2024. PolitiFact’s own fact-check of the transcript confirms the quote while noting Fauci did not say he “made up” the rules outright — a distinction worth keeping, because the underlying admission (no study, no data) is the part that stands on its own.
The guidance had consequences the diary can’t undo. FOIA’d emails published by the New York Post show CDC officials coordinating school-reopening language directly with the American Federation of Teachers before the agency’s February 2021 guidance — a CDC scientist called the level of union input “uncommon.” By October 2022, the Nation’s Report Card recorded the largest 8th-grade math decline since NAEP testing began in 1990: eight points. The 2024 results, released January 2025, showed reading still five points below 2019 levels at both tested grades. Economically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a 14.7% unemployment rate in April 2020 — 23.1 million people, the sharpest one-month jump on record.
Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I'm releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus' lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024.
For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health... Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research.
Announcing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS Secretary — the cabinet post that now oversees the agencies Fauci once ran.
On January 20, 2025, his final day in office, President Biden (D) issued Fauci a preemptive pardon covering any federal offense he “may have committed” between January 2014 and January 2025 — alongside Gen. Mark Milley and members of the House Jan. 6 committee. Biden’s stated rationale: the recipients faced “ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties.” Fauci’s own statement: “I have committed no crime. Certainly nothing criminal.” Rand Paul’s read was blunter: “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal.”
A pardon has limits, and the last eighteen months have tested every one of them. Within weeks, a coalition of 17 Republican state attorneys general, led by Alan Wilson (R-SC), announced they were examining whether Fauci violated state laws the federal pardon can’t reach. In April 2026, DOJ indicted David Morens, Fauci’s longtime senior scientific adviser, on charges of concealing records and using a private email account to evade FOIA — Fauci denies any knowledge of it, and Morens, like anyone facing pending charges, is presumed innocent. The five-year statute of limitations on Fauci’s own May 2021 testimony to Congress expired on May 11, 2026, without an indictment, despite Paul’s public pressure on the Justice Department to act before the deadline.
The 'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.
Trump's response to the pardon, tying it to the House Oversight Committee's autopen investigation. See our companion piece on the Biden autopen pattern.
Fauci was supposed to appear voluntarily. Instead, on June 22, 2026, Rand Paul’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenaed him after six months of negotiation collapsed. “He finally agreed to appear this month. Then he backed out. So I subpoenaed him,” Paul said. In the days immediately before the hearing, the committee released the diary, then the Slack messages. The timing is the point — every page is now part of the public record before Fauci says a word under oath.
Last week, Anthony Fauci notified us he will NOT voluntarily testify... Therefore, today I have issued a subpoena requiring him to testify before the Committee.
The hearing is set for Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at 8:30 a.m. ET, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, with Ranking Member Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) seated alongside Paul. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) previewed his own expectations bluntly on Fox News: Fauci would be “very forgetful, completely unrepentant, arrogant…don’t expect to get much out of him.” Paul was equally direct: “I don’t expect him to be honest, he hasn’t been honest in the last six years.”
“I don't expect him to be honest, he hasn't been honest in the last six years.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) · Chairman, Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee · July 2026
The pardon covers what Fauci did through January 2025. It does not cover what he says on Wednesday. New testimony that contradicts the diary would be entirely new exposure — and entirely his own.
A private 0.2 percent that became a public “10 times the flu.” A funding denial the government’s own inspector general contradicted. A six-foot rule Fauci himself says “sort of just appeared.” Eight lost points on the nation’s report card. A pardon that answers for the past but not for Wednesday. None of it is alleged anymore — it’s in his own handwriting, released by the committee that subpoenaed him, four days before he has to explain it under oath.
Two new threads surfaced in the 24 hours before Fauci’s hearing. National Review flagged a January 26, 2020 diary entry — two weeks before the fatality-rate entry above — in which Fauci wrote “now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” privately rejecting the Wuhan wet-market origin story he continued to cite publicly for months, including an April 2020 White House briefing where he called the evidence “totally consistent with a jump of a species from animal to human.”
House Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) used the run-up to spell out exactly what the pardon does not cover: “We now know why President Biden gave a blanket pardon to Dr. Fauci. While obsessing about his own fame, Dr. Fauci wasn’t truthful with the American people about the origins of COVID and advised schools to be closed,” Comer said. “Biden’s pardon doesn’t cover Dr. Fauci’s testimony this week and if he continues to lie, he must be held accountable.”
Cable news split on whether to cover any of it. On CNN’s NewsNight, when NY Post media reporter Lydia Moynihan tried to raise the diary story during an unrelated segment, host Abby Phillip cut her off on air: “We’re sitting here talking about Americans who were killed in theater, okay, as a result of a war. We are not going to pivot to Anthony Fauci’s diaries.” Fox’s Harris Faulkner took the opposite approach on Outnumbered the same day — “We need to make an example out of him,” she said, while fellow panelist Lisa Boothe added, “He knew the truth yet he told us lies.”
The hearing happened on schedule — Wednesday, July 29, 2026, 8:30 a.m. ET, before the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. Fauci’s opening statement accused Paul of an “unhinged obsession” with him. Then he did something no cabinet-era health official had done before a congressional panel: he invoked the Fifth Amendment, over and over, on the advice of counsel — a reported 111 times. Paul had Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, physically removed from the room by Capitol Police after repeated interjections.
Fauci’s answer, repeated to nearly every question: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) didn’t let the plea stand unanswered. He argued the pardon itself strips the privilege — citing Brown v. Walker (1896): “You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know.” Then he itemized more than $1 million in cash prizes Hawley alleges Fauci directed federal staff — among them Greg Folkers, Patricia Conrad, and Hugh Auchincloss — to pursue on his behalf using government time and resources. The single largest was a $900,000 Dan David Prize. Hawley has introduced a “No Cash Prizes for Bureaucrats Act” in response.
“You got rich, didn't you? You got rich while people were dying, hundreds of thousands of Americans — over a million in the end — and you were getting rich.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) · Senate HSGAC hearing · July 29, 2026
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went further on the man himself, telling Fox News Digital that Fauci is “the most damaging bureaucrat in the history of America,” and that “the fact that he knew he was lying to the American people — he should be held in contempt, he should be prosecuted for perjury and he should go to jail.” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) added an unscripted confrontation of his own, telling Fauci his “fifty plus year legacy of public service” now “ends in a total and complete disgrace.” Ranking member Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) called the hearing partisan, warning it would show future public-health experts “what they would have to go through” if they ever advised Congress again. Paul announced a committee vote on holding Fauci in contempt for the week of August 3, 2026 — not yet held as of this writing.
Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during Wednesday's Senate hearing, repeating on the advice of counsel that he would not answer questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Within hours, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) announced his own investigation, on the theory that Biden’s pardon covers federal offenses only — not state law. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) publicly backed the move. It faces a real legal hurdle: any actual state prosecution would need a state-law violation and personal jurisdiction over a man who doesn’t reside in Florida, and several outlets covering the announcement, including the reporters breaking the story, flagged that hurdle the same day. An investigation is not a charge.
Fauci's lack of candor to Congress is unbelievable. My office is launching an investigation into Dr. Fauci. It's past time we get the truth of what happened during COVID.
A separate diary excerpt surfaced the same day, dated August 13, 2022 — more than two years after the origin-story entries above, and on an entirely different subject. Per PJ Media’s review of the release, Fauci wrote that acknowledging the vaccines’ waning protection against transmission “would conflict with” the government’s effort to recommend the updated bivalent booster that September, and “would undermine the DOJ’s efforts at mandates for vaccines.” Treat that as PJ Media’s characterization of the entry rather than a verbatim block quote — Sen. Paul’s committee has not yet posted the underlying page image publicly.
Operation Warp Speed was a SPECTACULAR SUCCESS — I overrode Fauci on it, and his ideas were CRAZY. He was always trying to protect China.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Posted hours before Fauci's hearing; corroborated by Forbes, The Hill, and other outlets' paraphrase of the same post — no independent Truth Social URL was verifiable at time of publication.
None of this changes the legal bottom line from Wednesday morning: Fauci has not been charged with anything, anywhere. The federal pardon still stands. Florida is at the investigation-opening stage. The only vote actually scheduled is Congress’s own — on contempt, not a crime.
Two new diary-adjacent threads surfaced in the days after the hearing — one about what Fauci was doing behind the scenes while he became a household name, the other about what Senate Democrats did, or didn’t do, before they showed up to defend him.
On June 29, 2020, Fauci’s diary records him telling Vice President Mike Pence (R) directly: “I told him that I am being blocked from TV and I needed to get on TV to give the ‘risk reduction’ message.” Pence, per the entry, “promise[d] that he would get me out there on TV since he really liked my message.” By May 2020, Fauci had logged going from two TV appearances a day to one or two a week with no Sunday-show bookings — and he didn’t hide who he blamed. Of HHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo (R), Fauci wrote on July 2, 2020: “a con man who is completely full of sh--.” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (R) pushed back the other way two weeks later, complaining the pandemic response couldn’t become “a Tony Fauci show.”
“I told him that I am being blocked from TV and I needed to get on TV to give the 'risk reduction' message and that I would avoid being pitted against him or the POTUS merely by not playing that game.”
Anthony Fauci · personal diary · June 29, 2020 · on a meeting with VP Mike Pence
None of this is illegal or even unusual — press access is a normal West Wing turf fight. What it adds to the record is a private Fauci actively campaigning for more of the spotlight at the same moment his public message was “follow the science, not the noise.” He called his own celebrity “explosive and really unimaginable” and, in February 2020, noted an “amazing twitter storm” complete with a “#freeFauci” campaign after his bookings were briefly curtailed.
Committee chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) said after the hearing that his committee built a secure website with the full evidence file months in advance — and that no Democrat ever logged in. “We actually created a website, and we put all of the information on the website…The reason it hasn’t been accessed is no Democrat ever signed up for it. Not one Democrat,” Paul said. “They haven’t been on the website because they have not cared about the investigation.”
Ranking member Gary Peters (D-MI) disputed the framing entirely, calling the hearing “a culmination of months of biased and selected efforts by the majority…to basically legitimize a predetermined conclusion,” and accusing Paul of having “repeatedly excluded the committee’s minority and withheld documents and evidence from members that are entitled to receive them.” Paul called that “categorically false.” Neither side’s claim about document access has been independently adjudicated; both are presented here as competing, on-record statements from the hearing.
Neither thread changes what was already true: Fauci faces no charges, the federal pardon still stands, and the only scheduled vote is Congress’s own, on contempt. What both threads add is texture — one on how a public-health official managed his own fame in real time, the other on how a bitterly partisan committee disagrees about who actually did the homework before showing up to argue about it on camera.
The state investigations kept multiplying. On August 1, 2026, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R-LA) announced her office would join Florida and Alabama in examining whether Fauci committed state-law offenses the federal pardon can’t reach. “Louisiana and Missouri deposed Dr. Fauci. At the time, he claimed to not recall many key details of his own actions and now we are discovering contemporaneous records he kept,” Murrill said. “Louisiana will join Alabama & Florida in investigating Fauci and whether he committed any other offenses that could be pursued in our State courts.” Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) backed the move immediately: “As someone who was Attorney General alongside Eric Schmitt, and deposed Dr. Fauci, I am happy to have Louisiana join Alabama and Florida!” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) put the legal theory in blunter terms: “The ‘pardon’ signed by Joe Biden’s autopen doesn’t apply to state-level crimes.”
Coverage of the hearing itself split along familiar lines. NPR’s July 30 story led not with what Fauci refused to answer, but with public-health researchers who worried the hearing could produce a “chilling effect” on future congressional testimony. “These firings and these cuts — they’re creating a chilling effect, honestly,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) told NPR, “for the next generation of people who might consider stepping up to serve our nation.” Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina added, “I thought that we were healing as a country around COVID-19. I think what yesterday did was open some really deep wounds.” Newsbusters’ Clay Waters called out the framing directly two days later: a Fifth Amendment plea from the man who ran the pandemic response had become, in NPR’s telling, a story about the feelings of the people asking the questions.
The sharpest one-line rebuttal came from an unlikely corner. Actress Patricia Heaton spent August 1 stitching Fauci’s own contradictions into a single post.
Fauci: 'standing 6 feet apart is the most important thing' / Also Fauci: '6 feet apart is almost irrelevant' / Fauci: 'I highly recommend standing 6 feet apart' / Also Fauci: 'that was the CDC's recommendation, not mine.'
The more striking defection came from the left. Two nights earlier, on HBO’s Real Time (Friday, July 31), host Bill Maher — no ally of the Trump-era right — broke from his own side’s usual deference to Fauci. “He was caught in actual lies,” Maher said of the COVID-origins question. “And he knew better, because we have him in his diary telling us what he was saying to other scientists, who were saying, ‘No, absolutely.’” On why the lab-leak theory got dismissed for so long, Maher was blunt: “You couldn’t say it escaped from the lab, because that was the racist point of view.”
Bill Maher, on Real Time: Fauci was caught in actual lies about the origins of COVID. He knew better — his own diary shows what he was privately telling other scientists. The real issue is the gain-of-function research.
Writing in City Journal, science writer Nicholas Wade argued the hearing’s focus on Fauci understates the bigger story: the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted the underlying research under what Wade calls inadequate U.S. oversight, but China “controlled the research in Wuhan, let it proceed in unsafe conditions, and to this day has covered up all the relevant information.” Wade points to a rejected 2018 Defense Department funding proposal describing a virus engineered to differ from SARS-1 by up to 25% and carrying a furin cleavage site — a design he calls suspiciously close to features found a year later in SARS-CoV-2 itself. RealClearInvestigations linked and featured the piece prominently the same week; City Journal is the original publisher.
None of it changes Wednesday’s bottom line. Fauci faces no criminal charges anywhere. Three state investigations are now open — Florida, Alabama, Louisiana — and all three face the same jurisdictional hurdle: a state prosecution needs an actual state-law violation and personal jurisdiction over a man who lives in none of those three states. An investigation is still not a charge. What changed this week is who’s asking the questions — a conservative actress, an HBO host who spent five years defending Fauci’s public-health authority, and now a third attorney general.
The loudest reaction to Fauci’s Fifth Amendment plea didn’t come from a senator or a state attorney general — it came from a Steelers training-camp interview tent. On Monday, August 3, 2026, quarterback Aaron Rodgers joined ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show, broadcasting live from St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Asked by host Pat McAfee about his mindset entering his final NFL season, Rodgers pivoted straight to Fauci’s 111 Fifth Amendment invocations five days earlier: “I’m gonna plead the Fifth. Like that absolute coward Tony Fauci. Absolute coward.”
Rodgers didn’t stop there. “You got a pardon, and you pleaded over 100 times?” he asked, referencing the Biden pardon detailed above. “What are you scared of, Tony? I thought you were the science?” Per Fox News Digital and The Hill’s write-ups of the segment, Rodgers went further, calling Fauci “an absolute criminal.”
“What are you scared of, Tony? I thought you were the science?”
Aaron Rodgers · ESPN's The Pat McAfee Show · August 3, 2026
Rodgers turned the same segment on his own network. He accused ESPN of covering his 2021 vaccination-status comments far more aggressively than it covered Fauci’s Senate testimony, asking, “How much time did they spend on my responses every week, on my vaccination status?…Did they do even a minute on Tony Fauci?” He called ESPN a “gutless organization” with “no integrity,” contrasting the network with colleague Stephen A. Smith, whom he praised for apologizing on-air to NBA star Kyrie Irving over Irving’s own past vaccine comments.
The clip spread within hours — Mediaite, RedState, and Twitchy all ran it the same day. By Tuesday, August 4, the Pittsburgh Steelers had to respond. Rather than distance the team from a player attacking a former federal health official on live television, the organization backed his right to say it: “Discussions around culture and politics can bring differing perspectives, and our players are entitled to their own personal views,” a Steelers spokesperson told Fox News’ OutKick. Fauci has not responded publicly to Rodgers’ comments. Nothing about the legal picture changed — no charges, one federal pardon still standing, three open state investigations, one contempt vote still on the calendar. What changed is who’s saying it out loud, and how loud.
