Beyond the Covid origins: Fauci’s pandemic diary reveals a starstruck Julia Roberts and Trump gasping for oxygen

A diary played an unusual role in a contentious Senate hearing Wednesday – musings from Dr. Anthony Fauci, a scientist who became a leading voice in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, for years has accused Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease official at the National Institutes of Health, of lying about the origins of the coronavirus. In previous hearings, the now-retired Fauci denied the accusation, calling it “preposterous.” On Wednesday, he invoked the Fifth Amendment in declining to answer more questions.

But Paul drew public attention to the latest proceeding by releasing more than 1,000 pages of a long-running diary that Fauci kept – entries that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News his agency extracted from government computers and provided to the GOP-led committee.

Paul drew on selected excerpts to argue that Fauci’s “private record tells a different story” than what he told the country.

Some of the entries already were reflected in Fauci’s 2024 memoir and in interviews at the time – including the uncertainty that he and other scientists faced as they tried to understand a never-before-seen virus and how best to fight it. Here are some takeaways from the diaries, including quotes that have been edited to remove typos:

Did Fauci say one thing privately and another thing publicly?

Diary entry from January 26, 2020, about whether infections were connected to a market in China where animals were sold:

“It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the........

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