The Princess and the Diary: Fauci Faces the Music He Wrote Himself
For six years, Fauci has occupied the peculiar position of being simultaneously one of the most important men in the American pandemic response and, whenever particularly inconvenient questions arose, apparently just some guy who happened to be standing nearby.
On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The market, he noted, was the amplifier.
Then, almost as an afterthought: somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.
Five days later, on the February 1 conference call, according to his own notes, only two of the scientists on the line were convinced the virus was natural. The rest thought deliberate insertion was possible.
The two holdouts were Ron Fouchier and Christian Drosten.
Fauci recorded why he expected Fouchier to take that position: he was “the original GOF person with Yoshi Kawaoka.”
The man who had spent years creating more dangerous viruses in the lab was, unsurprisingly, not eager to entertain the idea that a lab might have been involved this time.
Drosten has always specialized in the confident dismissal. Useful man to have on a call if the goal is to shut a door rather than open it.
What followed is now familiar. The same circle of people who had just heard a majority of their peers leave the door open to laboratory involvement produced “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the paper that told the public that the laboratory scenario was NOT plausible.
Everybody recited it.
The question was declared closed while the underlying research - the actual sequences, the notebooks, the internal databases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - remained largely undisclosed.
Some of those databases went offline in September 2019.
Requests for lab notebooks tied to the U.S.-funded work were never fully answered.
The same pattern repeated on other fronts. Fauci knew early that the virus was highly age-dependent and far less lethal for the healthy majority than the fear campaign implied, yet he helped drive the maximalist public messaging anyway. Later, when the vaccines arrived, he pushed the claim that they would stop transmission. When that claim collapsed and it became clear vaccinated people remained infectious, he simply adjusted the language and kept talking, never clearly admitting the original promise had been false.
Meanwhile, the diary shows a man tracking his own ascent. The press was going wild with him. The White House was irritated that he was becoming a star that outshined the president.
This is the core of the performance. Fauci was not required to be omniscient.
He was required to be honest about the limits of what was known and about the conversations happening in the rooms he sat in. Instead we got a media star.
Tomorrow he will be asked to reconcile the notebook with the years of public messaging.
Expect talk about “evolving science,” about not wanting to fuel speculation, about the need for international harmony. Expect the suggestion that private musings are different from official conclusions.
Fortunately, one administrative detail has already been taken care of.
Before leaving office, Joe Biden gave Fauci a full and unconditional pardon covering any federal offenses he may have committed from January 2014 through January 2025 in connection with his work at NIAID and the pandemic response.
This should not be understood as an admission that Fauci had done anything wrong.
Tomorrow is the day. Tomorrow, he can concentrate entirely on the difficult business of remembering almost nothing about the period covered by his own diary he was pardoned for.
Our Sars Cov2 and COVID Database has been updated with new research data:
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