This last weekend, I spent a few hours paging through at least six dozen articles, essays, and summaries of scientific studies I’ve been collecting for five years, as well as about 100 pages of news reports and editorials about the release of the “document” that blew all that smoke away. I’m talking about portions of Dr. Anothony Fauci’s diary that were discussed last week during his testimony before the US Senate.
I’m sure you’ve read about it. Or at least seen the headlines. As The Wall Street Journal put it in an editorial published on Sunday:
“One conclusion is that on important points Dr. Fauci was both wrong and dishonest. For instance, he and allies in the government-science industrial complex still cling to the theory that COVID-19 evolved naturally in animal populations before spreading to humans. Yet on Feb. 1, 2020, his diary records a meeting with a dozen prominent virologists in which only two credited this ‘natural origins’ theory. … The diary suggests that by Jan. 26, 2020, Dr. Fauci believed the virus hadn’t originated in the Wuhan wet market. … This didn’t stop him and allies from painting skeptics of the natural-origin theory as politicized cranks and conspiracy theorists. … The diary also brags on Dr. Fauci’s influence persuading the likes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut schools and lock down large parts of the economy. Yet he later claimed in public that he never argued for locking anything down.”
My impetus for writing this was, obviously, as an “I told you so” to all those people, including good friends and family members, who have been dismissing – and dissing – my reporting on COVID-19, the vaccines, and the lockdowns.
Not that I expect what I’m writing now to illuminate any formerly unlit mental light bulbs. After reading and writing about this for nearly five years, I have accepted the fact that, like so many other important political, cultural, and social stories, the COVID-19 virus and its vaccines have been Trumpicized. Which means that Fauci was and always will be considered a national treasure.
Fauci’s Revealing (and Often Embarrassing) Diary Entries
If you saw any coverage of Fauci’s testimony before the Senate, you know that he invoked the Fifth Amendment no less than 100 times, and that Sen. Rand Paul announced a committee vote (scheduled for early August) on whether to hold him in contempt of Congress. If he’s convicted, it could result in fines and imprisonment. However, it’s hard to imagine that will happen, let alone stick, because this is exactly the sort of situation for which the Fifth was passed in the first place.
I didn’t watch the entirety of Fauci’s testimony, but I saw the highlights, and there was plenty of heated rhetoric and some physical drama – e.g., Sen. Josh Hawley calling Fauci “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar” who had “done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime” and David Schertler, Fauci’s attorney, being escorted out of the hearing room by Capitol Police after repeatedly interrupting the inquiry.
Here’s a quick summary of the claims made against Fauci…
Did Washington help pay for the research that made the virus – then work to bury it?
Me: If you watched the way Fauci responded to this question (put in different ways over several years, especially by Rand Paul), you would have been, as I was, skeptical in the early days because of his prevarications. But as facts filtered in from other sources, I began to believe that this charge is 100% accurate.
Nigel: The clean, well-documented charge is also the narrower one. US money, through NIAID and EcoHealth, reached the Wuhan lab doing coronavirus gain-of-function work, and Fauci’s own diary shows he took the lab-leak possibility seriously in private while calling it a fringe theory in public. The bioweapon claim goes further than the evidence does – and it doesn’t need to be true for the rest to be damning. They funded risky research, suspected early it might have escaped, and told the public the opposite.
* Diary entries show that at a Feb. 1, 2020 meeting with about a dozen virologists, only two attendees believed the virus had a natural origin – yet Fauci and allies went on to publicly insist on natural, market-based origin and treated lab-leak proponents as fringe.
* As early as Jan. 26, 2020, Fauci’s diary records his own view that the Wuhan wet market “was not the source, it was the amplifier” – a private admission that undercuts the natural-origin narrative he and his agency publicly promoted for years.
* A diary entry invokes virologist Dr. Zheng-Li Shi’s years of gain-of-function work “to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor,” with Fauci writing “we could not let this go” – read by critics as evidence he understood the lab-leak hypothesis was live and significant well before he dismissed it publicly.
* NIAID, under Fauci, funded EcoHealth Alliance, which sub-granted money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for coronavirus research. After a 2014 Obama-era pause on gain-of-function funding, a 2017 policy (P3CO) narrowed the definition of regulated research in a way critics say created a loophole that let this funding continue.
* Fauci is alleged to have helped shape the “Proximal Origin” paper that publicly dismissed the lab-leak theory, even though some of its authors privately called a lab escape “highly likely” around the same time they were in contact with him.
* Declassified material reportedly released by Tulsi Gabbard is cited as showing a CIA analytic panel voted 6-1 for a lab-leak explanation, and that Fauci was positioned to help steer the public conclusion toward natural origin despite this internal dissent.
Note: Independent, non-partisan virology critiques of “natural origin” (e.g., statisticians challenging the market-epicenter data) argue the zoonotic case is weaker than claimed. But none of those critiques go so far as to prove a lab origin, let alone a deliberate bioweapon.
If he did nothing wrong, why the deleted emails and the 100+ pleas of the Fifth?
Me: At first, I was surprised he did that. He already had a blanket presidential pardon by Biden (or his automatic pen). Why not tell the truth? Unless he was ashamed of his role in the whole mess. Or was it possible that his legal team had advised him to do that precisely because he had a pardon, and the questions were meant to catch him in current lies, which would not have been covered by the pardon? Still, he was a key figure (if not the key figure) in all the false propaganda, misleading comments, deceptions, and outright lies.
Nigel: Taking the Fifth is a constitutional right, not a confession, and even The Wall Street Journal warned Rand Paul against criminalizing policy disagreements. But “please delete this email after you read it,” an assistant deleting “tons” of messages, and a flat contradiction of his own 2024 sworn testimony are not the habits of a man with nothing to hide. Pleading the Fifth 100 times may be shrewd lawyering. It is not the conduct of an innocent bystander.
* Sen. Paul’s committee says it obtained a Feb. 2, 2020 email in which Fauci told NIH Director Francis Collins to “please delete this email after you read it,” and that a Fauci assistant told investigators she deleted “tons” of emails – directly contradicting Fauci’s 2024 congressional testimony that he never deleted federal records.
* Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 100-111 times before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, including in response to trivial, non-incriminating questions (e.g., what day of the week it was).
* In his opening statement, Fauci accused Paul of having an “unhinged obsession” and framed the release of his diary as an attempt to “embarrass and intimidate” him – a response critics characterize as deflection rather than engagement with the substance of the allegations.
* Some legal commentators, including Alan Dershowitz, argue that invoking the Fifth is not evidence of guilt, that Fauci’s lawyers advised an all-or-nothing invocation to avoid “opening the door” to further questioning, and that the committee itself was operating with a partisan agenda rather than a genuine truth-seeking purpose. Even the WSJ editorial board – otherwise highly critical – cautioned that Paul seemed “too set on criminalizing policy differences.”
Did he turn a public-health emergency into a million dollars in personal prizes?
Fauci honored at the 2022 National Portrait Gallery’s Portrait of a Nation gala
Me: Sen. Hawley alleged that Fauci used at least eight federal employees, on federal time and using federal resources, to help him solicit and win more than $1 million in outside cash prizes and awards during the pandemic – including a $900,000 Dan David Prize. And that Fauci invoked the Fifth rather than answer for it. I would treat this as a serious claim not yet proven. I believe money had something to do with it, but I don’t think that was Fauci’s primary motivation. I think he got caught. He was a key promoter of gain-of-function research, exported it overseas when President Obama signed an executive order banning it from taking place in the US, and when the virus broke out, it was cover-my-ass all the way.
Nigel: If the allegation holds up, it’s no crime of the century. But it’s the small, grubby kind of self-dealing that tells you how a man saw the moment: not only as a duty, but as an opportunity.
Did he mandate shots he privately knew wouldn’t keep people from catching or spreading the virus?
Me: Yes. If not in the very beginning, then soon thereafter. And despite continuing evidence that came in over the months and years that the shots were neither effective in shutting down the spread of it or protecting the vaccinated, he continued to promote this lie until the day he retired.
Nigel: In his diary, Fauci conceded as early as August 2021 that protection against infection was “low to modest at best” and fading – while he publicly pressed universal vaccination, boosters, and the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” line. You can still argue that the shots cut severe illness. That case survives. What doesn’t survive is the justification used for the mandates, which rested on stopping transmission. The very thing his diary shows he knew they didn’t reliably do.
* Diary entries reportedly show Fauci privately acknowledging as early as August 2021 that vaccine protection against infection “waned” and was “low to modest at best,” even as he publicly continued to press for universal vaccination and booster mandates.
* Fauci is described as pressuring then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to override her own advisory committee’s September 2021 vote against recommending boosters for occupationally exposed workers, warning she would be “forever branded” as a weak leader if she didn’t – a push that reportedly influenced state-level booster mandates for healthcare workers.
* Fauci allegedly discouraged the CDC from issuing a candid public statement – one Walensky reportedly wanted to make – that vaccines “do not protect against infection at all,” on the stated reasoning that such honesty “would undermine the DOJ’s efforts at mandates.”
* Fauci is said to have personally shaped President Biden’s September 2021 mandate speech and its “pandemic of the unvaccinated” framing, even as his own diary allegedly shows he knew vaccine efficacy against infection was limited at the time.
* Despite later publicly denying involvement in school closures (“Show me a school that I shut down… Never. I never did,” 2023), Fauci’s diary reportedly takes credit for personally persuading NYC Mayor de Blasio and California Gov. Newsom’s office to close schools, bars, and restaurants in March 2020.
Was “trust the science” really an operation to silence the scientists who disagreed?
Me: Yes. And everyone else. This was a particularly disturbing part of the whole charade. It was a lie. One of those very big, very obvious lies that we’ve been hearing since we were told that men can have babies. I don’t know why this became a thing with politicians, but it continues and it is disgusting.
Nigel: “The three stooges” and the campaign to “shut up” Stephen Moore weren’t scientific rebuttals – they were efforts to discredit credentialed critics rather than answer them. You can think the Great Barrington authors were wrong on the merits and still be alarmed that the response was to smother their argument instead of engaging it. Science that has to be shielded from its critics has stopped behaving like science.
* Diary entries show Fauci and Francis Collins privately disparaging Great Barrington Declaration authors Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff as “the three stooges,” while publicly favoring censorship of their focused-protection alternative to blanket lockdowns.
* Fauci’s diary reportedly shows him pressuring the Trump White House to “shut up” economist Stephen Moore over a critical Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Dr. Wrong,” warning of backlash from “the entire academic community” if the White House didn’t act.
Was the press covering Fauci – or covering for him?
San Francisco, 2022
Me: This is an easy one. Except for courageous bloggers on social media, the entire press, even most of the conservative press, promoted the official, false narrative.
Nigel: The cozy, flattering exchanges with anchors, the bobbleheads and celebrity fan mail, and the near-silence of the major outlets now that the diaries are out – together they describe access, not scrutiny. I’d hold the motive loosely: Some of the soft coverage was ordinary herd instinct, not coordination. The effect was the same either way. A watchdog that wags its tail isn’t guarding much.
* Diary entries obsessively track Fauci’s own media coverage and celebrity status – including a self-description as “the most famous and talked about person in the country” and detailed notes on praise from celebrities such as Barbra Streisand, Joan Baez, Julia Roberts, and Stephen Curry – often devoting as much diary space to press coverage as to substantive science or policy.
* Fauci’s diary reveals a notably warm, mutually flattering relationship with journalists including Jake Tapper (CNN), Chuck Todd (NBC), and George Stephanopoulos (ABC), which the WSJ editorial board argues functioned as informal media protection that helped shut down public debate over COVID policy.
* Fauci’s public image was marketed on branded merchandise – t-shirts, bobbleheads, candles, socks, and a “Patron Saint of Public Health” necklace – reflecting a level of celebrity/hero worship critics say made his claims harder to publicly challenge at the time.
And then there’s this…
The Personal Health Contradiction
* Documents released through Paul’s committee reportedly show Fauci suffered a pulmonary embolism/pulmonary infarction in June 2021, months after his own vaccination, requiring anticoagulant therapy (Eliquis) – a recognized rare vaccine side effect he did not disclose while continuing to publicly champion universal vaccination with high confidence.
* Fauci reportedly contracted COVID-19 in June 2022 despite being fully vaccinated and twice boosted, a personal breakthrough infection that critics contrast with his public messaging on vaccine protection.
The Dismissal of Alternative Treatments and Data
* Sen. Ron Johnson confronted Fauci with studies claiming 60-70% efficacy for ivermectin that existed around the same time Fauci was publicly stating there was “no evidence” the drug helped, suggesting to critics that contrary data was dismissed rather than engaged with. (Note: The broader, later evidence base on ivermectin is disputed and mostly negative in larger trials.)
From Trust to Suspicion: Five Years of Keeping an Eye on Fauci
For years, when I wrote about the many things that were clearly wrong with the official Big Government/Big Media narrative of COVID-19 and the vaccines, I was criticized as being a conspiracy theorist. But now, the media outlets that were towing the line back then have a new story to tell us.
Now, all those lunatic right-wing theories about how the virus had a natural origin, that it wasn’t a product of gain-of-function research, that it did not begin in a US-funded research lab in Wuhan, China – most if not all of them were “probably” true.
And guess what? The drug industry, the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, the NYT, The Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, and even the WSJ, were not complicit in promoting the pack of lies they were peddling (and attacking those that were questioning those lies). They were just “doing the best they could with the information they had at the time.” (Which – in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 – is exactly what I said they would say.)
No, they aren’t culpable.
They have identified the man who seems to have been the mastermind and chief teller of lies for the whole massively murderous and destructive charade. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the completely believable head of the NIH and chief spokesman for the government.
His personal diary has been found – a document that is hardly much in terms of scientific evidence or legal proof but has, for whatever reason, been taken seriously enough to have blown away all the smoke that surrounded the actual facts. And the public finally has a chance to take an honest look at the virus, the vaccines, and the lockdown.
Health & Well-being
Could this be why some journalists are still defending Fauci?
Take a look at this essay by Alex Gutentag in today’s issue of Public News.
Health & Well-being
Banned by YouTube!
This man had the answer to the COVID-19 outbreak.
In May 2021, Dr. Peter McCullough sat down for an interview with Focal Point’s John Leake. YouTube deleted the video of the interview a few hours after it was posted – but every statement Dr. McCullough made about the terrible decisions made by our government and our government’s health institutions, and the media’s role in promoting the misinformation about the way it was handled, has since been proven true.
You can read Leake’s account of what happened here, including a link to the original interview and a link to YouTube’s CEO bragging about what they had done.
Social Issues
Readers Write: re the first installments of my AI report
From SL: “Well done. What you’ve written seems on target to me, and studying the social impact of technology has been my passion since college. You’ve inspired me to write my own status update on how I’m using AI for language learning and how I think it will change language learning in a fundamental way. I’m also having chats (interviews, really) with my friends in the language learning field at universities in order to learn what they are thinking and doing.”
My Response: I’m glad you are doing that. Language learning is one of the areas where AI involvement seems not only inevitable but potentially revolutionary. Not only because of the infinite possibilities of conversation, but also because the machine itself is self-teaching, instructed to learn from experimenting with different pedagogical approaches, and will be constantly improving its manner of instruction.
From BB: “The legions of copywriters who reach out to me daily have a far grimmer assessment [of the future of their industry] than you do. Here’s an example.”
Social Issues
Postscript: Pushing Back Against the Tyranny of the Woke with Humor
Watch stand-up comic Arynne Wexler roast the Lefties here.
