BREAKING: Fauci Privately Did Not Believe COVID…

For more than four years, Americans were told a consistent story by the nation’s public health establishment: COVID-19 most likely jumped from an animal to a human at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. That theory, pushed aggressively by Dr. Anthony Fauci and echoed throughout the mainstream media, was used to dismiss and discredit anyone who suggested the virus may have instead escaped from a nearby Chinese laboratory.

Now, thanks to newly released personal diary entries, we know Fauci himself did not believe the market theory even as he was helping sell it to the American public.

The revelations come from more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary, released this week by Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Paul, who has spent years clashing publicly with Fauci over the origins of the pandemic and the National Institutes of Health’s funding of controversial gain-of-function research in China, published the diary under the title “Tony’s Diary Package.”

The most damning entry is dated January 26, 2020, nearly two months before the World Health Organization would officially declare COVID-19 a global pandemic. In his own handwriting, Fauci recorded a conclusion that directly contradicts the narrative he would spend the following months promoting to Congress, the media, and the American people.

“It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market,” Fauci wrote. He continued, noting that Chinese officials had initially claimed there was no human-to-human transmission and that all of the original 27 cases traced back to the market. But by late January 2020, according to his own private notes, Fauci already understood that explanation to be false.

“Now we know the market was not the source; it was the amplifier,” he wrote.

Read plainly, those words mean that America’s top infectious disease official privately concluded, at the very earliest stages of the outbreak, that the seafood market Americans were told was ground zero for the pandemic was in fact nothing more than a location where the virus spread rapidly after already existing elsewhere. The market was not the origin. It was simply where an already circulating virus found more hosts.

Despite reaching that conclusion privately in January, Fauci continued publicly promoting the wet market narrative for months afterward. During a White House briefing in mid-April 2020, Fauci told the American public that the available science was, in his words, totally consistent with a virus jumping from an animal species to a human, a carefully worded statement that reinforced the natural origin theory even as his own diary shows he had significant doubts about where exactly that jump occurred.

The diary entries also reveal that Fauci was not alone in his skepticism. According to the documents, the vast majority of scientists Fauci consulted in those early weeks also leaned toward the lab leak explanation rather than the wet market theory, a stunning admission given how aggressively the scientific and media establishment worked to characterize the lab leak theory as a fringe conspiracy pushed only by political partisans.

Just weeks after privately acknowledging doubts about the wet market theory, Fauci would go on to promote and cite a paper published in Nature Medicine titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which suggested an animal source was likely present at the Huanan market given the number of early cases linked to that location. That paper became one of the most heavily cited pieces of scientific literature used to shut down any serious discussion of the lab leak hypothesis throughout 2020 and 2021.

Years later, in July 2022, two studies published in the journal Science attempted to revive the wet market theory, claiming the Huanan market was the early epicenter of the outbreak. But even the lead author of one of those papers, Michael Worobey, later admitted that a significant majority of early COVID cases, roughly 75 percent by his own accounting, had no established connection to the market whatsoever. Critics have long noted that Wuhan, home to at least a dozen biological research laboratories, saw its earliest reported cases scattered widely throughout the city center, not clustered tightly around the market as the official narrative implied.

The diary also sheds light on Fauci’s private reaction to those who dared question the official story. According to entries reviewed by Paul’s committee, Fauci grew furious with FBI investigators who reached conclusions favoring the lab leak theory, dismissing their assessment and writing that the bureau had no idea what it was talking about. He similarly expressed frustration with members of the Senate, including Paul himself, whom Fauci privately characterized as conspiracy theorists for pushing exactly the kind of scrutiny that his own diary now proves was warranted.

Perhaps most notably, the diary references the work of Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, known within scientific circles as the bat lady for her extensive research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci’s NIH had a documented history of funding research connected to Shi’s laboratory work through subgrants tied to EcoHealth Alliance, funding arrangements that have drawn intense scrutiny from congressional investigators for years.

Critics have long speculated about why Fauci moved so aggressively to shut down the lab leak theory despite significant uncertainty among scientists in those early weeks. The diary offers a possible answer, or at least strongly implies one. For decades, Fauci’s agency had funded precisely the type of gain of function research that critics believe could have produced the pandemic if something went wrong inside a Chinese laboratory. If the lab leak theory turned out to be true, Fauci himself would have faced direct scrutiny over his own agency’s funding decisions.

The diary entries paint a picture of a man keenly aware of his own public image throughout the crisis. Separate entries reveal Fauci recounting conversations with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and staff for California Governor Gavin Newsom, in which both officials reportedly told Fauci they were basing major shutdown decisions, including school and business closures, directly on his public television commentary rather than on any formal scientific consensus.

For millions of Americans who lost jobs, watched their children fall behind in school, or were barred from visiting dying relatives in hospitals during the pandemic, the revelation that the nation’s top health official privately doubted the very narrative he was using to justify those sacrifices lands as a significant and troubling development.