Fauci’s Private Diary Just Put Him in a Very Uncomfortable Position Before His Senate Testimony

The number was sitting in Anthony Fauci’s own diary.

Five weeks before he told Congress that COVID-19 was probably killing about one percent of infected people, Fauci privately recorded a far lower estimate after a call with former CDC Director Tom Frieden.

Now more than 1,100 pages of those notes are public, and Fauci is scheduled to sit before the Senate Wednesday morning.

The post that set off the latest round of scrutiny landed Tuesday:

Legacy media including CNN, ABC, NBC, the AP, The Washington Post, and The New York Times have all failed to report on the Fauci diary, which allegedly reveals Anthony Fauci knew COVID-19’s mortality rate was lower than publicly promoted and misled the public with messaging that contradicted internal data.

— Leading Report (@LeadingReport) July 28, 2026

One part of that post is now too broad.

The Washington Post and CBS News have both published stories about the diary release, so this is no longer a total media blackout.

But the underlying mortality entry is real, and the wording is even more direct than the social-media shorthand suggests.

The Senator Rand Paul Reading Room package runs 1,141 pages and reproduces Fauci’s near-daily notes from the pandemic years. The released file carries Paul’s name across every page and includes Fauci’s running case totals, meetings, calls, media appearances and private impressions.

On February 7, 2020, Fauci wrote that researchers needed serology to measure infections that were asymptomatic or only minimally symptomatic. He specifically tied that missing denominator to the need to determine the true case fatality rate.

The next morning, Fauci recorded 34,867 known cases and 724 deaths, a raw calculation just above two percent. Testing was still heavily concentrated among people sick enough to be identified, leaving officials unsure how many mild or silent infections had never entered the count.

Then came the key passage on printed page 687. Fauci memorialized a call with Frieden and wrote down the much lower estimate they reached after accounting for that unseen pool of infections.

Fauci wrote that Frieden had called and that the two men were “on the same page” about the outbreak behaving like a bad influenza in its transmissibility.

Because they believed the real number of infections was far larger than the confirmed count, Fauci wrote that the case fatality rate was “more like 0.2-0.3%” rather than two percent.

That was an early estimate made with incomplete information. It was not a final scientific measurement, and the global evidence changed rapidly over the following month.

Still, the entry cannot be dismissed as nothing more than a comparison between a raw confirmed-case rate and a rate adjusted for hidden infections.

Fauci and Frieden were explicitly adjusting the denominator upward to account for infections that had not been counted.

That is what makes his later testimony so difficult to ignore.

The official House Oversight Committee transcript records Fauci’s sworn testimony on March 11, 2020, when Rep. Michael Cloud asked him to compare COVID-19 with seasonal flu. By then, the World Health Organization had declared a pandemic and the hearing was focused on how much worse the U.S. outbreak could become.

Cloud noted that seasonal flu mortality was commonly placed near 0.1 percent and asked Fauci for a practical comparison. Fauci answered that the stated COVID-19 mortality across the available data was about three percent after initially appearing closer to two or three percent.

Fauci then made the same kind of denominator adjustment found in his diary. He said counting minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infections would probably bring the mortality rate down to around one percent.

That adjusted figure, Fauci told lawmakers, would make COVID-19 roughly ten times more lethal than seasonal flu. It was not presented as a raw confirmed-case rate; it was his estimate after allowing for infections that testing had missed.

His private February estimate and public March estimate were made five weeks apart, and no honest account should pretend nothing changed during those five weeks.

Italy’s outbreak was exploding, and testing remained badly incomplete.

Doctors were still learning how age, underlying conditions and overwhelmed hospitals affected the risk.

But both estimates tried to solve the same denominator problem by accounting for mild and asymptomatic infections that official testing had missed.

The diary put that private estimate at 0.2 to 0.3 percent.

The testimony put the adjusted estimate at about one percent.

That does not prove perjury by itself.

It does establish a dated discrepancy between what Fauci recorded privately and what he later told Congress under oath.

Sen. Rand Paul has been making that case publicly as the hearing approaches:

“That level of dishonesty is really astounding.” Sen. Rand Paul says Dr. Fauci’s own diary entries undercut his public COVID messaging.

— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 27, 2026

CBS News confirmed that Paul released more than 1,000 pages covering the period from December 2019 through December 2022. The report said the notes begin in the days before the United States declared a public-health emergency and continue until Fauci stepped down after nearly four decades leading NIAID.

The records capture Fauci’s private impressions, his interactions with President Trump’s pandemic team, his media appearances and his running battles over COVID’s origin and the government’s response. They also show the uncertainty inside government during the outbreak’s earliest weeks, before officials claimed to have firm answers.

CBS reported that Paul subpoenaed Fauci as part of the committee’s continuing investigation into the pandemic’s origin. It also noted that the FBI and CIA have issued assessments favoring a laboratory-related origin, with the CIA attaching low confidence to its conclusion.

Fauci declined to comment to CBS before his scheduled appearance. That silence leaves the mortality question exactly where it belongs: in front of Fauci, under oath, with the diary and the March 2020 transcript both on the table.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee lists Fauci as the witness for Wednesday’s 8:30 a.m. hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The official page identifies him as the former NIAID director and, for now, shows him as the only witness on the panel.

Paul chairs that committee and has spent years accusing Fauci of giving Congress and the public one story while the internal record told another. The hearing arrives after an extended committee investigation, document releases and a subpoena compelling Fauci’s appearance.

This time, Paul will not have to build the mortality question from a secondhand account. His staff can place the Senate-hosted reproduction of Fauci’s own February 8 entry beside the official transcript of Fauci’s March 11 testimony.

The dates, figures and words are already fixed in the record. Paul can ask a simple question that cuts through years of argument: What changed between the private estimate and the number Fauci presented to Congress?

If better evidence pushed the estimate from 0.2 or 0.3 percent to one percent, Fauci can identify that evidence and explain when it arrived.

If the lower estimate was only a tentative conversation with Frieden, he can explain how much confidence he placed in it and whether he shared it with President Trump’s task force.

If there is another explanation, Wednesday is his opportunity to give it.

Americans lived through school closures, business shutdowns, mandates and years of demands that they place unquestioning trust in public-health authorities.

They are entitled to know whether the numbers presented to Congress reflected Fauci’s best judgment at the time—or whether his private assessment was materially different.

No one has to accept every accusation Paul has made to see why this entry matters.

The diary is public.

The sworn testimony is public.