Anthony Fauci reads an opening statement as he testifies before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Capitol Hill on July 29, 2026. Francis Chung/AP
On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released a trove of diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old immunologist and public health veteran who led the US response to the Covid pandemic in 2020. On X, Paul posted an AI-generated image of a grinning, pastel-sweater-clad Anthony Fauci lying on his stomach on a purple shag carpet, poring over a unicorn-themed diary and surrounded by teen girl accoutrements. Paul explained to his 5.9 million followers that the image was “What Anthony Fauci looked like every night when he wrote about how great he is in his diary.”
The diary entries contain plenty of cringeworthy moments—Fauci congratulating himself on how famous he had become, for example, and basking in the attention of female celebrities like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. What they don’t contain—much to the dismay of Paul and Fauci’s other critics—is any kind of smoking gun proving that the public health leader deliberately misled the American people.
Undeterred, Covid truthers have only amped up their efforts to prove that Fauci lied—and they’re spinning up conspiracy theories about crucial information they say is missing from the diary.
In an email newsletter Wednesday morning, MAHA Action, the political lobbying group founded by key allies of Health and Human Services Secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., presented a complex theory concerning University of North Carolina coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric’s absence from the diaries. He has emerged as an important figure for people seeking to prove definitively that Covid came from a lab. Margaret Menge, the author of the newsletter who describes herself on LinkedIn as a “truth seeker and news innovator,” argues that the diary’s omission of Baric is fishy, because Fauci was meeting with him in 2020. “What did Fauci really know or suspect about the origin of the virus?” Menge writes and then expands her thesis. “It’s not in the diary entries. But leaving Baric’s name off the list is a sign that he was hiding something, and an indication he suspected that the diary entries would one day be made public.”
If Fauci had imagined a future diary release scenario, would he not have allowed that his Barbra Streisand fangirling might make him seem, well, uncool?
While it’s theoretically possible that this happened, the idea of Fauci practicing self-restraint by deliberately omitting the name of a virologist seems dubious, considering the verbose nature of the rest of the diary. If Fauci had imagined a future diary release scenario, would he not have allowed that his Barbra Streisand fangirling might make him seem, well, uncool?
Baric’s absence isn’t the only thing that Covid skeptics find suspicious about the diary. There are the theories from Mary Talley Bowden, the Texas otolaryngologist who gained notoriety during the pandemic for her advocacy around discredited Covid treatments and criticism of vaccines. “I think Fauci scrubbed his diary of all mentions of ivermectin when we sued the FDA and overcame their motion to dismiss,” she posted to her 641,000 followers on X. “It’s odd that there is no mention of it at all. What else have you noticed that’s missing?” The lawsuit she refers to is one that she and several colleagues filed in 2022, accusing the US Food and Drug Administration of overstepping its authority by issuing public warnings advising against using one of President Donald Trump’s treatments of choice, ivermectin, to treat Covid. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled in favor of Bowden, saying the FDA had gone too far in its warnings—but overwhelming evidence still suggests that the horse dewormer ivermectin isn’t an effective Covid treatment.
While the MAHA Action newsletter writer and Bowden appear to believe that Fauci was censoring himself, others in the Covid denialist universe seem to think that nefarious government forces censored the diary. KanekoaTheGreat, an anonymous right-wing account with a million followers, notes that a June 2021 entry about a lung blood clot that Fauci suffered was originally published and then redacted. “Did Fauci’s lawyers demand the redaction?” reads the post. “Why scrub a lung blood clot from 2021 after it went public?”
While KanekoaTheGreat doesn’t allege that the blood clot was connected to Fauci receiving a Covid vaccine, anti-vaccine activists were quick to spin it that way. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group co-founded by RFK Jr., published an article titled “Fauci Treated for Pulmonary Infarction Months After Getting COVID Vaccine, Diaries Show.” Vince Langman, a MAGA influencer with 565,000 followers on X, posted, “I was suspended from Twitter 1.0 for telling people the Covid Vaccine can cause blood clots! This makes my blood boil!” But there’s a much simpler explanation for the redaction: It contained personal health information, which would put Paul in violation of federal medical privacy protocol.
At a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer Rand’s questions, arguing that the hearing was little more than a witch hunt. “The sole reason [Rand] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”
