Dr. Fauci, the Diaries, and the Fifth Amendment

A Warning Delivered in January 2017

Three years before anyone had heard the word COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci stood at a Georgetown University Medical Center forum titled “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration,” delivered days before President Trump’s first inauguration, and made a prediction that reads very differently today than it did then:

Many have asked the obvious question: how could any man be that confident about an outbreak that had not yet happened? It is a fair question to raise, and Fauci’s own conduct since has done nothing to discourage people from asking it.

In fairness, the mundane explanation deserves to be stated. Fauci was speaking at a preparedness conference, drawing on thirty-two years as NIAID director during which outbreaks had arrived with grim regularity — SARS in 2003, H1N1 swine flu in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2015. His larger point in that speech was a request for a standing public-health emergency fund, and predicting that something would emerge in a four-year presidential term required no special foreknowledge, only an actuary’s memory. Readers should weigh that context honestly.

But the 2017 speech matters for a different and more defensible reason. It establishes that the man who would soon become the most powerful health official on earth understood perfectly well, years in advance, that a novel outbreak was coming. He was not caught unaware. And that makes what the diaries now reveal about his conduct once it arrived considerably harder to excuse as the confusion of a man overtaken by events.

What the Diaries Revealed

On July 25, 2026, Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s day-to-day work diaries, kept on government systems during his final years as NIAID director. Three findings have dominated the coverage since.

First, on the origin of the virus. A diary entry dated January 31, 2020 — before most Americans knew an origins debate existed — records that Fauci had been told by top virologists that the virus’s furin cleavage site raised real doubts about a natural origin, with roughly half the scientists on that initial call believing the genome looked “constructed,” and agreeing the question required investigation. For the following years, Fauci publicly and confidently dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis and insisted the science was settled.

Second, on school closures. In a 2022 interview Fauci said flatly of the closures, “I had nothing to do” with them, adding, “let’s get down to the facts.” His own diary from March 2020 records that he “convinced” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools,” and that he “should close the bars and restaurants in NYC.” The same entry describes a similar call with Ann O’Leary, then chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom, after which Newsom “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.” Senator Paul described Fauci in these entries as “giddy” over convincing mayors to shut down schools.

Third, on the man himself. Interleaved among the death counts are entries of a kind that require no interpretation:

The diaries catalogue Fauci masks, murals, portraits and bobbleheads; Brad Pitt playing him on Saturday Night Live; a novelist telling him she had based a handsome character on him. A pre-COVID entry from 2013 complains that the Department of Health and Human Services would not let him do a CNN interview out of, in his words, “pure jealousy,” because he was a “rockstar” stealing their thunder. Senator Ron Johnson called him a “megalomaniac.” Representative Tim Burchett, reading the same entries, reached instead for Romans 1.

In fairness, the record is not uniformly damning. Other entries show Fauci writing that he was “almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though … I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak,” and calling for a thorough investigation while noting that no one was 100 percent certain of the origin, himself included. Some entries express discomfort with his fame and fear for his family’s safety. A number of virologists argue the shift in his thinking simply tracks how scientific consensus formed as evidence accumulated. Readers should know those entries exist alongside the others.

The Contradictions

What the diaries chiefly establish is a pattern of divergence between the public voice and the private pen:

Silencing the Dissenters

The most consequential part of this story is not any single contradiction but the machinery assembled to ensure no contradiction could be heard. In October 2020, three credentialed epidemiologists — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford — published the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for focused protection of the genuinely vulnerable rather than blanket lockdowns, and warning that indefinite restrictions would cause “irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

Four days later, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins emailed Fauci and NIAID deputy Clifford Lane. The email, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and quoted in Dr. Bhattacharya’s sworn congressional testimony, reads:

It soon was. Fauci replied that same night pointing to material already in circulation. Within days, articles appeared characterizing the debate as manufactured and the authors as fringe mavericks. Bhattacharya has since testified that he was “specifically targeted for censorship by federal government” officials, and that he was left puzzled when reporters began asking why he wanted to “let the virus rip” — a characterization he says Collins and Fauci primed. These are not three cranks on the internet: they hold appointments at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. That is precisely why they had to be discredited rather than answered.

The same period saw sustained federal pressure on social-media companies to suppress what was labeled COVID misinformation — conduct that became the subject of the Missouri v. Biden litigation, in which a federal judge ordered Fauci and other officials to testify under oath. When Fauci was finally deposed about his campaign against the Declaration, he professed not to remember doing what his own emails record him doing.

Fame, Money, and Power

The material rewards of the position are a matter of public record. Fauci was, by Forbes’ accounting of federal salary data obtained under FOIA, the highest-paid employee in the entire federal government — $417,608 in 2019, rising to $480,654 in his final year, more than the President of the United States, more than the Chief Justice, more than any four-star general. Asked on camera in 2020 whether he had millions invested in vaccines, he laughed and answered, “Matthew, no, I got zero! I am a government worker. I have a government salary” — without mentioning that the salary in question was the largest in the federal government.

Documents released by Senator Paul’s committee on July 24, 2026 report that Fauci accumulated cash prizes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars during the pandemic, with the NIH’s second-ranking official serving effectively as his personal awards manager and taxpayer-funded staff assisting. He and his wife — herself chief of bioethics at the NIH Clinical Center — saw their household net worth rise substantially across the pandemic years, and he has since drawn royalties from a 2024 memoir and paid speaking engagements.

His Religious Background: A Jesuit Product

Fauci’s formation was thoroughly Jesuit, and this is a matter of documented record rather than inference. Raised Catholic in Brooklyn and educated at Our Lady of Guadalupe elementary school, he attended Regis High School, the tuition-free Jesuit preparatory academy in Manhattan (class of 1958), where the curriculum ran four years of Latin and three of Greek under the Jesuit motto of forming “Men for Others.” He proceeded to the College of the Holy Cross, another Jesuit institution, graduating in classics with a pre-medical concentration in 1962, before Cornell University Medical College. He has said publicly that Regis “was the best educational period I could ever have imagined having,” and has credited the Jesuits with supplying “the principles that I run my life by.”

The Jesuits, for their part, claimed him openly and proudly. In May 2020 — at the very height of the lockdowns, the same week Fauci testified before the Senate HELP Committee — Regis High School’s president, the Jesuit Father Daniel Lahart, said this of him:

Fauci never distanced himself from that characterization. He did rather more than that: in the same month, at the peak of a national emergency he was directing, he recorded video messages for the graduating classes of all sixty Jesuit high schools in the United States, speaking to them of Jesuit ideals. Lahart noted that Fauci “speaks so easily about what his Jesuit education means to him, so I presumed it wouldn’t take him long to film either one.” Jesuit-aligned publications have since written of how his “Jesuit formation guided him through the fury of the pandemic” and of the Jesuit tenets he carried into his infectious-disease work. This was not an old school tie quietly held. It was an active, mutual, public alliance maintained while he held the most powerful health office on earth.

This publication has long examined the operations of the Society of Jesus in government and public life, and our judgment is plainly stated: Anthony Fauci functioned as a Jesuit operative at the summit of American public health. We do not mean by that some secret coded instruction from Rome, and we will not claim documents we do not have. We mean what the record plainly shows — a man formed from boyhood by the Jesuit system, who credits that system with forming his life and career, whom the Jesuits publicly claimed as their most trusted man in America, who lent his office to their institutional messaging at the height of a crisis he was directing, and whose policies advanced precisely the centralized control of conscience and assembly that order has pursued for five centuries. An operative need not carry orders in his pocket. It is enough that he was made, claimed, and used.

What makes it stranger still is where that formation ended up. By his own repeated testimony Fauci is not a believer in any meaningful sense. He told Science in 2003: “Broadly and generically, I am not a regular church-attender. I have evolved into less a Roman Catholic religion person to someone who tries to keep a degree of spirituality about them. I look upon myself as a humanist. I have faith in the goodness of mankind.” Asked on C-SPAN in 2015 whether that remained accurate, he answered, “Totally accurate today.” In 2021 the American Humanist Association named him its Humanist of the Year. And in a 2023 BBC interview he explained why he no longer practices: “I think my own personal ethics on life are … enough to keep me going on the right path,” adding that there are “enough negative aspects about the organizational Church,” and dismissing the practice of his professed faith as “almost like a pro forma thing that I don’t really need to do.”

Note carefully that the humanism and the Jesuit formation are not in conflict; they are the same fruit at different stages of ripeness. Jesuit formation trains a man in “the principles of humanity and goodness to mankind,” as Fauci himself described what he took from it, and sets his own trained conscience up as sufficient authority. Strip away the sacraments he found “pro forma” and what remains is precisely what he professed: faith in the goodness of mankind, and personal ethics adequate to keep him on the right path without God. “Faith in the goodness of mankind” is not the faith of the Scriptures; it is its exact opposite, for the Word of God testifies that “there is none good but one, that is, God” (Mark 10:18) and that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). A man who trusts in the goodness of mankind will inevitably trust most of all in himself — and this man told a frightened nation that opposition to him was opposition to science itself.

Shutting the Churches: An Attack on Religious Liberty

For Christians, the gravest count in this indictment is not the school closures or the economic wreckage but what was done to the worship of God. Under the lockdown framework Fauci authored and promoted, congregations across America were forbidden to assemble — in many jurisdictions while liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries, casinos, and big-box retailers remained open by government designation as “essential.” Believers were arrested for singing in parking lots. The dying were denied the comfort of a pastor. Churches were told the state would determine whether, when, and how the body of Christ might gather.

It is fair to note that Fauci himself issued no order closing any church; governors and mayors did that. But that distinction is thinner than it appears, and his own diary is what makes it thin. Those officials acted on the federal guidance framework he authored and on his televised pronouncements — and as the diaries now establish, he personally telephoned mayors and governors’ offices to press for closures of gathering places, then went on television and denied having anything to do with the closures. The man who “convinced” a mayor to shut a city’s schools, bars, and restaurants does not get to claim he was a passive observer of what was shut next.

The courts eventually said so. In Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (November 2020) the Supreme Court blocked New York’s worship restrictions, with Justice Gorsuch writing that “there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques.” In Tandon v. Newsom (2021) the Court struck down California limits that reached even into private homes to restrict Bible studies and prayer meetings. That such rulings were necessary at all is the point: the American church spent a year litigating for permission to obey the command not to forsake “the assembling of ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25).

And here the comparison many readers have drawn deserves to be made plainly. The methods deployed against the American church in 2020 — the state deciding which assemblies are permitted, which are “essential,” how many may gather, whether singing is allowed, whether a pastor may enter a hospital — are the ordinary instruments of religious control in the People’s Republic of China, where congregations must register with the state, unregistered churches are raided, crosses are torn from buildings, pastors are imprisoned, and worship is surveilled. We do not say the two were equivalent in severity; American restrictions were temporary, were fought in open court, and were struck down, while China’s are permanent and enforced with prison. But the principle conceded was the same principle: that the civil magistrate may determine the terms on which God is worshipped. That principle, once conceded in an emergency, does not un-concede itself when the emergency passes. It was not a coincidence that the funding trail in this whole affair ran to a laboratory in Wuhan; a government that claims that authority over the conscience finds natural partners in a government built on it.

The Pardon and the Fifth Amendment

Which brings us to the central puzzle of the hearing. On January 19, 2025, in one of his final acts in office, President Biden issued Fauci a preemptive, full and unconditional pardon covering “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon.” Fauci had never been charged with anything. Biden stated the pardon should not be “mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing,” and Fauci said he had “committed no crime” and that there were “no possible grounds” for prosecution.

Two questions follow, and both were raised at the hearing. The first is the start date. Why should a pardon reach back to January 1, 2014 — five full years before COVID-19 emerged? Senator Ashley Moody of Florida put it to Fauci directly, noting that 2014 is the year the NIH began awarding the EcoHealth Alliance grant whose funds supported bat-coronavirus work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci declined to answer.

The second is the one many readers will find most telling. If a man holds a blanket pardon for everything he might have done across eleven years, and if he has committed no crime, what exactly is left to incriminate him? Senator Paul argued the Fifth Amendment invocation was “unsupported” precisely because the pardon had removed the jeopardy the privilege exists to guard against. Senator Josh Hawley pressed the same point.

Here the honest answer is a legal one, and readers deserve it. The pardon covers only conduct through January 19, 2025 — it grants no immunity for anything said afterward. Fauci’s stated reason for silence was that Paul’s purpose was “to get me to say something — anything — that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars,” and that new statements could expose him to a fresh perjury charge or open new lines of investigation. Paul conceded his own theory that a pardon strips the privilege has “probably never been tested legally” and would be “a question for the courts.” Meanwhile the statute of limitations on the earlier alleged false statements to Congress expired in May of this year.

So the strict legal position is defensible. But ordinary people are entitled to notice the distance between it and the man who said in 2020, on camera, that he was “very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee” because “we have nothing to hide at all” — and who, six years later, sat silent through a hundred questions while his own attorney was removed from the chamber by Capitol Police for interrupting. The committee votes on a contempt resolution August 5. The Florida attorney general has announced a state investigation, on the theory that a federal pardon does not reach state charges. Whatever the courts eventually decide, the verdict of the public is not in much doubt.

A Christian Perspective

There are several things a believer should take from this, and the first is the smallest: do not be surprised. Scripture never taught us to expect that men entrusted with vast power would use it honestly, nor that private conduct would match public profession. It taught the opposite, and it taught us where such things end.

The diaries are a striking illustration of a promise most men would rather forget. Fauci recorded his private thoughts on government servers, in the confidence of a man who believed himself admired beyond challenge; those pages were subpoenaed, printed, and read aloud to him in a Senate chamber by men who despised him. “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23) is not a figure of speech. Nothing is hidden that shall not be known. Every man reading this should ask what he has written, said, or done in the confidence that no one would ever see it — and remember that One has seen it all already, and that “God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing” (Ecclesiastes 12:14).

The second lesson concerns where trust belongs. A frightened world was told to follow a man, and did, and the man told it that to question him was to question science itself. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3). Whether the office is medical, political, or ecclesiastical, no man is a safe object of the confidence that belongs to God alone, and the Christian who forgets it will be disappointed as surely as the world was.

Third, we should grieve the real damage. Children lost years of schooling on the strength of advice a man privately took credit for and publicly disowned; livelihoods were destroyed; families were parted at deathbeds; and honest scientists with Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford appointments were smeared as fringe for asking whether the policy was working. Some of that will never be repaired in this life. That is not a partisan observation but a human one.

And finally, a word against bitterness. It is right to want the truth told and wrong done answered for; Scripture commends the magistrate who bears the sword to that end (Romans 13:4). But the believer does not get to enjoy another man’s ruin. Anthony Fauci is eighty-five years old, without the excuse of ignorance and without, so far as his own public testimony discloses, any Saviour but his own personal ethics. Whatever a Senate committee resolves on August 5, and whatever a court someday says about the reach of a pardon, there is a bar from which no pardon is issued by autopen and before which the Fifth Amendment may not be invoked.

Pray, then, for a nation that gave one man that much power and for the many who still defend him; pray for the children whose years were taken; and pray even for Dr. Fauci, that before the end he might come to know that no man’s personal ethics have ever been enough, and that the mercy he sought from a president is offered freely, and far more surely, by the Judge of all the earth.

Sources drawn from reporting by NPR, the Washington Post, CBS News, NBC News, STAT, Axios, Forbes, Newsweek, Science, and the Epoch Times; the diaries and records released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (July 24–25, 2026); Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s sworn congressional testimony of March 2023 quoting the FOIA-obtained Collins email; Georgetown University’s own account of Fauci’s January 2017 address; Fr. Daniel Lahart’s May 2020 remarks as reported by America Magazine, the National Catholic Reporter, Catholic News Service, and Crux; the Supreme Court’s opinions in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020) and Tandon v. Newsom (2021); and Fauci’s interviews with Science (2003), C-SPAN (2015), and the BBC (2023). Current as of July 31, 2026; the contempt vote and Florida investigation remain pending.