LILLEY: Diaries seem to show Anthony Fauci more interested in fame than facts

Documents reveal public health official obsessed with media attention, while dismissing dissent, lab leak theory

Published Jul 28, 2026  •  3 minute read

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at the Rayburn House Office Building on June 3, 2024, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Chip Somodevilla /Getty Images

If only Anthony Fauci had cared as much about facts during the COVID-19 pandemic as he did about his fame. The release of his diaries should embarrass him and remind us that many of the people pushing lockdowns and restrictions were deeply flawed.

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Fauci’s diaries document his obsession with the media and fame, his conflicting positions on the lab leak theory for the virus and his disastrous dismissal of the Great Barrington Declaration.

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Highlights of Anthony Fauci’s diary. Photo by Toronto Sun graphic

From expert to celebrity

In the early days of the pandemic, Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a medical adviser to the president. While his main role should have been providing serious medical advice, clearly he relished his growing celebrity status.

Dinners with CNN’s Jake Tapper, requests for vaccine advice from Barbra Streisand, Julia Roberts fangirling over him during an online chat. Fauci documented each and every media appearance across the United States and around the world, including many Canadian interviews with the likes of CBC News and Global.

“The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable,” he wrote in May 2020. “It is not without hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked-about person in the country and one of the most recognizable (people) in the world.”

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Too bad he didn’t pay as much attention to his job of assessing the medical evidence and providing sound advice to elected officials.

An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on April 17, 2020. Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL /AFP via Getty Images

The lab leak dismissal

Fauci spent a lot of time, energy and political capital in the early days of the pandemic trying to undermine the idea that the virus had leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He maintained the virus emerged naturally and worked to discredit those advancing the lab leak theory, now considered a “most likely” explanation by officials including a U.S. House committee panel.

“Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans,” Fauci wrote in his diary on Jan. 26, 2020.

A few days later, on Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci convened a call with other leading public health officials and scientists to discuss the issue of the virus’ origin. He described how there was not a consensus with some arguing that the virus originated naturally. “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.”

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GOF, short for gain of function, involves altering an organism’s genetic makeup to enhance specific traits. Fauci has always denied that organizations he oversaw funded gain-of-function research, but the evidence would appear to show that is exactly what happened.

When he wasn’t smearing those who raised the lab leak theory, Fauci was dismissing those who offered alternative ideas on how to deal with the virus.

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The ‘stooges’ who were right

In October 2020, three well-regarded scientists and infectious disease specialists, Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, issued the Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration argued that COVID-19 posed limited risk to most people and that lockdowns were causing harm. Rather than impose society-wide restrictions, the authors advocated focused protection for the vulnerable and herd immunity among low-risk groups.

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Fauci dismissed the three scientists as “stooges” in his diary.

The declaration ultimately proved more prescient than Fauci. One of those “stooges,” Bhattacharya, is now director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Fauci is set to appear before a Senate committee in Washington on Wednesday and he should face tough questions from committee members. Yet much of the media still treats Fauci as a hero. The questions raised by his diaries are likely to make many journalists nearly as uncomfortable as they make Fauci.

That’s too bad because the media that made him a star, including our own, owe readers an apology for failing to ask the questions Fauci was already answering in his private diary.

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