Fauci diary pages blame Trump for lab leak theory’s rise

Newly released diary pages show Anthony Fauci blamed President Trump for the lab leak theory’s rise, casting scrutiny of Wuhan-linked funding as political tension with China.

Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday released fresh pages from Anthony Fauci’s daily diary, stored on government servers and spanning December 2021 to May 2022. The entries put Fauci’s private account of the COVID-19 origins fight in plain view.

In a March 21, 2022 note, the longtime National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director wrote that public concern over a laboratory origin in Wuhan grew out of politics, not the facts on the ground. The Daily Caller reported the release and the diary language in detail.

Fauci’s institute at the National Institutes of Health had backed work tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance. Trump ordered that grant canceled in 2020 after learning of the Wuhan link. Fauci treated that order as the spark for everything that followed.

Fauci called the lab leak fight a product of Trump-China tension

The March 21 entry left little ambiguity about whom he held responsible.

Fauci wrote in the diary:

"Very important issue to discuss in the book. The entire controversy with China as the source of the outbreak and the lab leak theory stems from the tension between Trump and China,"

He went further, describing the grant termination itself as baseless in his telling.

Fauci also wrote:

"Please remember that when it was brought to the attention of Trump that the NIH was funding a grant at Wuhan where the outbreak was first recognized, Trump ordered, with no evidence to support any suspicion, that we cancel the grant,"

That framing cast a presidential decision to cut Wuhan-linked funding as the original sin. It also set up Fauci’s next claim: that the canceled grant produced both the “deomization” of EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak and the lab leak theory itself.

He wrote that the episode “clouded the picture of our ability to further investigate the very likely cause of the outbreak which was a natural jumping of virus from an animal species to human.” In his private telling, natural origin was settled enough to treat lab-leak questions as a distraction.

Those same pages show Fauci casting himself as the target once the public fight with Trump was underway, a posture that later collided with Kennedy’s charge that Fauci knew he was lying as more records surfaced.

He said public conflict with Trump made him the “focal point”

Fauci did not stop at blaming the former president for the theory’s spread. He explained his own central role in the controversy as a byproduct of that clash.

In the diary he wrote:

"Because I am the director of NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and was involved in somewhat of a conflict publicly with Trump, I then became the focal point of the building conspiracy theory that somehow or other NIH played a role in the outbreak,"

He planned to work the theme into a forthcoming memoir. The diary treats lab-leak scrutiny as a “conspiracy theory” aimed at NIH rather than a line of inquiry about risky research and weak oversight.

Paul’s release did not include a full unredacted archive of every surrounding page. What it did show is a senior federal health official, writing on government systems, sorting the origins debate through a political grievance with Trump.

That record lands alongside other congressional pressure on Fauci’s candor, including moments when a Senate push for a special counsel probe followed newly surfaced texts.

EcoHealth kept NIH money even as the Wuhan grant was pulled

The diary’s account of the 2020 termination sits beside another fact Fauci’s own institute controlled. At the same time the Wuhan-linked grant was cut, NIH awarded EcoHealth Alliance a new grant. Conditions later placed on the group were, in Fauci’s words, ones “they essentially were not able to meet.”

EcoHealth had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronavirus work. The nonprofit discovered novel coronaviruses and joined lab experiments that enhanced them. It also exported about 11,000 viral samples from Yunnan Province, where close relatives of the COVID-19 virus circulate, to Wuhan.

An official in the office of then-NIH Director Francis Collins later pressed Daszak for records on the coronaviruses found with NIH money and held at the Wuhan lab, plus the high-risk experiments there. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic emails showed Daszak did not expressly demand lab notebooks from Wuhan. He told collaborator Shi Zhengli about the NIH request.

Four years after the 2020 termination fight, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services moved to debar Daszak and end EcoHealth’s funding. HHS said the step would “protect the public interest” after evidence mounted of reckless biosafety practices and shifting statements to federal regulators about a delayed grant report covering the stretch just before the pandemic.

A 2024 NIH employee statement added that EcoHealth had underwritten gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan. The diary’s early insistence on a clean natural-origin picture did not age well against that paper trail.

Fauci’s private narrative also tracks a wider pattern of stonewalling that fed later contempt fights, including the Senate panel action after 111 Fifth Amendment invocations.

DEFUSE was a “nothingburger” in Fauci’s January 2022 note

Another diary beat undercuts the claim that lab-leak questions were empty politics. In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance co-wrote the DEFUSE grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric.

An investigative report on that proposal landed in January 2022. Fauci’s diary dismissed it as a “nothingburger.” He did so while still writing that Trump’s grant order had unfairly birthed the lab-leak theory and damaged Daszak.

The sequence is straightforward. Risky coronavirus work linked to Wuhan drew presidential action in 2020. Fauci, in 2022 private notes, blamed Trump for the public’s refusal to drop the lab question. Federal watchdogs later punished EcoHealth’s leadership. NIH’s own employee described gain-of-function support in Wuhan. Fauci’s diary still treated the alternative theory as a conspiracy aimed at him.

Readers tracking the paper trail will also recall separate diary disclosures about message management, including how Fauci diary entries showed outreach over “Beaglegate” fallout.

Paul’s release puts the blame-shift on the record

Paul, a Kentucky Republican, has spent years pressing NIH and NIAID on Wuhan funding, EcoHealth oversight, and origins transparency. The new pages do not rely on secondhand spin. They are Fauci’s own words, saved on government servers, written while he prepared book material.

In those words, tension with Trump, not biosafety gaps, not the Yunnan-to-Wuhan sample pipeline, not DEFUSE, not unmet grant conditions, explained why Americans asked whether a lab was involved. He called natural spillover “very likely” and labeled NIH’s alleged role a “building conspiracy theory.”

The same federal system that once defended EcoHealth’s access later sought to cut it off in the public interest. Daszak’s debarment did not come from a Trump order. It came years later, under a Democratic administration, after the compliance record caught up.

Fauci’s March 2022 entry still read the entire China-source controversy as a derivative of Trump’s clash with Beijing and with Fauci himself. That is the story he wanted in the book. Paul’s release put the draft on the public record instead.

Taxpayers funded the grants, lived with the pandemic’s costs, and were told for years that lab-leak questions were fringe. The diary shows how hard a top official worked to keep the politics on Trump and the science debate on a short leash.