His Diary Said 0.2 Percent.
He Told Congress Ten Times the Flu.
Wednesday, He Answers Under Oath.
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 testifies under subpoena. 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.
