New FOIA doc: Fauci note-to-self shows some real mental gymnastics!

In a private note about his memoir, Fauci told himself the lab-leak theory grew out of Trump cancelling the Wuhan grant. His own file has the lab question raised seventy-seven days earlier — on a call

Among the Fauci diary pages Senator Rand Paul’s office has now released — the “Missing Pages” covering December 2021 through May 2022 — there is a single entry dated March 21, 2022 that is not like the others.

It is not a record of a meeting or a press hit. It is a note Anthony Fauci wrote to himself about the book he was planning to write. He marked it with four asterisks.

“****Very important issue to discuss in the book.”

What follows is his account of where the lab-leak theory came from. And the useful thing about this document — the reason it is worth your time — is that we can check it against his own file from two years earlier.

I am going to do that carefully, because the honest answer is: he is partly right.

The Note, In Full

Quoting the whole thing matters here. The short version circulating today cuts the middle, and the middle is where he tells you what he thinks he is explaining.

“****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. 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. As it turns out it is illegal to do that without cause and we had to re institute the grant and put conditions on it that they essentially were not able to meet. This led both to the deomization of Peter Dascak of EcoHealth and to an emergence of the theory of a lab leak and 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. Because I am the director of NIAID 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. This led to the preposterous accusations on the part of people like Rand Paul that I was responsible for the death of 5 million people. This led to my pushing back publicly against people like Senator Paul which among many other issues made me a ‘polarizing figure’. However, remember to emphasize in the book that a lot of this really stemmed from Trump inappropriately ordering the cancelling of the Wuhan grant. This is a critical fact that should be developed in the book.“

The misspellings are his. The diary is dictated.

Missing Pages diary, March 21, 2022. Released by Chairman Rand Paul.

Where He Has a Case

Let me give him the parts that hold up, because they do hold up.

The cancellation did come from the White House. The House Oversight committee’s account is that the instruction ran from chief of staff Mark Meadows through HHS’s general counsel to NIH’s Lawrence Tabak and then to Michael Lauer, who sent the letters of April 19 and April 24, 2020. Fauci confirmed that sequence when the committee put it to him in January 2024. Lauer said he knew of no EcoHealth compliance problem before April 19.

The grant was already a target before NIH moved. On April 18, 2020, Peter Daszak wrote to thank Fauci for “publicly standing up” for natural origin, and noted his grant had been “publicly targeted by Fox News reporters at the Presidential press briefing last night.” That briefing was April 17. NIH’s first letter went out two days later.

Daszak to Fauci, April 18, 2020. A block of the email is withheld under FOIA exemption (b)(7)(A).

So: a politically driven cancellation, of a grant that was already being hammered on cable news, in an election year, against a backdrop of genuine Trump–China hostility. That is a real description of April 2020, and anyone who tells you Fauci invented it is not reading the file either.

Eleven Weeks

Here is the part that does not fit.

The note says the cancellation “led… to an emergence of the theory of a lab leak.”

The first NIH letter was April 19, 2020. The Fox News question was April 17.

Fauci’s own diary entry for January 31, 2020 — seventy-seven days earlier, eleven weeks to the day — records a phone call from Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust, who conferenced in Kristian Andersen:

“There have been conspiracy theories that the virus was given GOF by inserted mutations and deliberately or accidentally released in Wuhan… Everyone thinks that is crazy, but the Farrar phone call was different. The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary ‘jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.”

A note on that last clause, since it will get mangled: “the former” refers to accidental release, not deliberate. He is recording that the scientists thought an accident was the likelier of the two release scenarios.

Fauci’s diary, January 31, 2020.

The next day he convened the call. His diary lists who was on it — Collins, Farrar, Patrick Vallance, Andersen, Christian Drosten, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Ron Fouchier, Robert Garry, Marion Koopmans — and records the split:

“There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this… Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.“

Fauci’s diary, February 1, 2020 — the teleconference and the participant list.

That is not a theory emerging from a grant cancellation. That is the director of NIAID, on January 31 and February 1, 2020, organizing an international call about whether the virus had been engineered — and writing down that the Wuhan connection was why they could not drop it.

The Contemporaneous Emails Say the Same Thing

The diary is dated by Fauci, and the release does not establish when each entry was dictated. So lean on the timestamped email instead. It tells the same story.

January 31, Andersen to Fauci: the virus “looks totally normal” on a phylogenetic tree, but “some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” and “Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” He adds, fairly, that “those opinions could still change.” Fauci replies: “Thanks, Kristian. Talk soon on the call.”

February 1, 7:29 a.m. Eastern, Fauci to his deputy Hugh Auchincloss, subject line “IMPORTANT,” attaching a file named “Baric, Shi et al - Nature medicine - SARS Gain of function.pdf”: “It is essential that we speak this AM… You will have tasks today that must be done.” Six hours later he forwards the same file to Lawrence Tabak: “Here it is.”

February 2, Farrar: “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release — I am honestly at 50!” Michael Farzan, quoted in the same thread: “I am 70:30 or 60:40.” Robert Garry: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario.”

And Francis Collins, the same day, in the line that ages the worst:

“I am coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely. But I share your view that a swift convening of experts… is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate.“

February 2, 2020 — Collins replying beneath Farrar’s “I am honestly at 50!”

By February 4, Farrar was still writing: “’Engineered’ probably not. Remains very real possib[ility] of accidental lab passage in animals… Eddie would be 60:40 lab side. I remain 50:50.”

Eleven weeks before the grant was touched, the most senior public-health officials in the United States and Britain were trading odds on whether the virus came out of a lab.

Being Fair About What This Is

A few things this is not.

It is not a lie, and I am not going to call it one. It is a private note, dictated two years after the events, by a man drafting a memoir and working out his own story. Everyone who has written a book has done some version of this. The question is not whether he shaped a narrative — it is which facts he chose to stress and which he left out of his own account.

Read charitably, the note may not even mean what it looks like. He writes that he “became the focal point of the building conspiracy theory that somehow or other NIH played a role in the outbreak.“ That version of the theory — the one that puts NIH money at the center — genuinely did intensify after April 2020. If that is what he meant by “the theory of a lab leak,” his timeline is defensible. It is just not what the sentence says.

Two more cautions. Fauci’s claim that Trump acted “with no evidence to support any suspicion” is his characterization — the documents do not establish what the White House knew in April 2020, and the House committee later argued the opposite. Attribute it to him; don’t print it as fact. And his claim that the grant was reinstated with impossible conditions needs checking: the reinstatement the House report walks through happened in April 2023, a year after this note was written.

There is also the simplest tension of all. In June 2020, asked by the House why the grant was cancelled, Fauci said: “It was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it. I don’t know the reason, but we were told to cancel it.” By March 2022 he had a reason, a mechanism, and a villain. He may well have learned more in between. Someone should ask him when.

What’s Actually Here

Strip away the politics and this is a document about sequence.

The lab question did not arrive from Donald Trump. It arrived from Jeremy Farrar’s phone call on January 31, 2020, and from Kristian Andersen’s email the same day, and from a conference call Fauci himself convened the next afternoon — a call where most of the participants thought deliberate insertion was possible and the Wuhan Institute’s gain-of-function work was the reason they could not let it go.

Seventy-seven days later, a grant got cancelled.

Both things are in his file. Only one of them made it into the note about what to emphasize.

I do not claim credit. I claim receipts.

Sources: “Tony’s Diary: The Missing Pages (December 2021–May 2022)” and the July 2026 diary package, released by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, paul.senate.gov. Fauci emails from the Leopold NIH FOIA release and the Tobias productions (documents 120 and 121). Termination chain and 2024 testimony from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic final report, December 2024, pp. 125–127.