Sen. Rand Paul released Dr. Anthony Fauci's private diary entries showing the nation's top pandemic official tracked his own celebrity with striking intensity, even as COVID-19 killed tens of thousands of Americans.
On April 7, 2020, more than 60,000 Americans had already died from the virus. Fauci, then the face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, sat down and wrote not about ventilator shortages or hospital capacity but about press coverage. "Press still hot and heavy about me," he wrote. "Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me." The entries, released by Paul's Senate office ahead of Fauci's subpoenaed testimony, paint a picture of a public health official who spent considerable private energy cataloging his own rising stardom during a national emergency.
Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, posted on X on June 28: "Anthony Fauci will answer to the American people." He has long clashed with the 85-year-old former White House COVID adviser over the federal pandemic response and the origins of the virus itself. The diary release lands just days before Fauci is scheduled to appear under subpoena before Paul's committee.
The entries grow more self-regarding as the death toll climbs. By May 21, 2020, nearly 98,000 Americans had died of COVID. Fauci wrote that his "national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable." He insisted the description was "not hyperbole." He noted that "countless" media profiles and his expanding presence on television were turning him into "a star that outshines" the president. Newsmax confirmed the same diary excerpts and death-toll figures.
The contrast is hard to miss. The man in charge of guiding America through its deadliest public health crisis in a century was privately marveling at his own name recognition, not in a passing aside, but in sustained, detailed diary entries that read like a media consultant's self-assessment.
Fauci also documented that Secret Service officers stationed at the White House gates would wave his vehicle through security checkpoints without asking to see his identification. He treated the anecdote as further evidence of how recognizable he had become. For context, those gates exist to protect the president and senior officials from threats, not to measure a bureaucrat's Q rating.
Questions about Fauci's conduct during the pandemic have deepened in recent years. Congressional investigators have examined whether he played a role in steering scrutiny away from the lab-leak hypothesis, and the diary entries add a new dimension to that inquiry: the mindset of the official at the center of it all.
In late June 2020, the United States recorded a then-record 40,000 new COVID cases in a single day. Hospitals in Sun Belt states were filling again. Fauci's diary entry from that period does not dwell on the surge. Instead, he wrote about receiving an invitation to appear on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars."
The diary does not say whether Fauci seriously considered the offer. But the fact that he recorded it at all, during the worst single-day case count the country had seen to that point, speaks to where his attention drifted when the cameras were off and the notebook was open.
Fauci eventually acknowledged in the diary that his growing media profile risked creating friction with the White House. He wrote that he had "no desire to conflict with, embarrass or show up the POTUS" when he later decided to stop participating in profile interviews. The decision reads less like humility and more like political calculation: he recognized the coverage was becoming a liability, not that the coverage itself was misplaced.
Separate diary entries examined by Fox News reveal additional details about Fauci's private views of political and media figures. Those entries describe an initially warm relationship with President Trump that later deteriorated. Trump at one point called Fauci "the smartest person in the world," per the diary. Fauci also described HHS Assistant Secretary Michael Caputo as "a con man who is completely full of sh\*\*\*" for blocking his television appearances while publicly claiming to support them.
The diary release is not an isolated act. Paul subpoenaed Fauci to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and the entries were published through Paul's Senate website as a PDF document. The timing is deliberate: Paul wants the public to read the diaries before Fauci sits in front of his committee under oath.
Paul has argued that the entries reveal a public health official "overly worried about his celebrity, personal image and media narrative during a time of national emergency." That framing will almost certainly shape the hearing. Fauci did not respond to requests for comment from the New York Post.
A CIA whistleblower's testimony before the Senate has already raised questions about whether Fauci worked to steer intelligence agencies away from the lab-leak conclusion. The diary entries do not directly address that issue, but they establish a pattern: an official acutely aware of how he was perceived, and willing to manage that perception even as Americans died.
Trump senior adviser Peter Navarro offered a sharper assessment. In a Fox Business interview on June 25, Navarro branded Fauci "the 'Dr. Frankenstein of the modern era'" and accused him of having "the blood of millions of people on his hands."
"You need to come clean, Fauci."
Navarro's language was blunt, but the underlying question is one that Paul's committee will press in more measured terms: What was the nation's top pandemic official focused on when the crisis was at its worst?
Efforts to declassify documents related to Fauci's pandemic-era conduct have gained momentum across multiple branches of government. The diary entries now join a growing body of material that congressional investigators are using to reconstruct what happened inside the federal response, and who was accountable for what.
The Fox News review of the diaries surfaced additional entries that go beyond fame and into Fauci's relationships with media and political figures. One entry recounts an encounter with Hunter Biden, who joked that the internet "would explode" if someone photographed them together because they were both "being attacked by the far right GOP." Fauci recorded the exchange without apparent discomfort.
Another entry captures Fauci's reaction to a piece by The Atlantic's Peter Nicholas that suggested Fauci had been "humiliated." Fauci's private response, written in his diary, was blunt: "F\*\*\* you, Peter." The language is notable less for its profanity than for what it reveals about Fauci's preoccupation with how journalists framed his public standing, even as his stated job was managing a pandemic that was killing more than a thousand Americans a day.
The broader picture emerging from Fauci's personal diaries is of a man who understood his public role carried enormous consequences but who devoted striking amounts of private reflection to tracking his own media footprint. The question Paul's committee will try to answer is whether that fixation affected the decisions Fauci made, on lockdowns, on masks, on the origins of the virus, and on what the public was told.
Fauci kept a diary. The diary kept score. And the score he was tracking had nothing to do with saving lives.
