Then-NIAID director Anthony Fauci talks to members of the press prior to an event at the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington on Jan. 21, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. He can be reached at tucker@brownstone.org
The combined files necessary to unravel the COVID era—the actors, the motivations, the many moving parts—run into the hundreds of thousands of pages. Confusing and convoluted does not quite describe them. One way to conceptualize the fullness of the issue is to focus on the most remarkable document yet, the daily logs of Anthony Fauci, now called the diaries.
They were kept on government computers. Their preparation was assisted by government employees. By law, the results belong to the public. And yet it is obvious that these notes were a first draft of what he hoped would be his autobiography. These were left behind when he retired from public service in December 2022.
My own analysis confirms my big picture framing of his motivations throughout. Fearing a disclosure that Fauci himself funded the research that created the virus, his actions that followed were an attempt to convert villainy to valor, while his cultivated fame was structured to avoid shame.
1. The clue comes very early in the diary when COVID was barely hitting the news. He was ginning up frenzy over a probable flu pandemic that he hoped would serve as a cover story.
Jan. 3, 2020:
A week later:
The CDC was confused and displeased by Fauci’s push to warn of a bad flu year because it was nowhere justified in the data.
From Jan. 14, 2020:
2. The work on the vaccine started already on Jan. 14, earlier than we thought. Moderna, named from mRNA technology, was already the chosen company. Dr. Barney Graham was tagged to work on it. He owned a patent on methods of manipulating the spike protein of coronaviruses.
3. The same week, Jan. 26, 2020, Fauci is in contact with Nancy Messonnier of the CDC—the sister of Rod Rosenstein of the DOJ whom Trump forced to fire James Comey—and the first person to brief NYT, WaPo, and the WSJ of likely lockdowns on Feb. 25. The NYT pushed lockdowns Feb. 27 with a podcast and then two op-eds the next day. Messonier never consulted the White House.
Here is Jan. 26 when it all began. Here is where Fauci works with Messonier to “coordinate our responses.” This same day, Fauci says that “Bob and I feel … that we should be allowed to send our CDC epidemiologists to China” to “see the data first hand” since the United States will “base important response activities” on what they see.
4. We can reasonably presume that Fauci knew of the lab leak many months before. He likely hoped that SARS-CoV-2 would vanish into the firmament of a bad flu season but China made that impossible. He also likely knew that it would not hold up to blame wet markets.
From Jan. 26, 2020, the same day as he was planning to send emissaries to China, he was already scripting a narrative.
5. From early 2020 through 2021, it was a common claim by Fauci and others that the incubation period of COVID was up to two weeks. This matters because it would suggest an unusual silent spread that would justify extreme actions. In reality, he already knew on Jan. 30, 2020, that the latency period was 2–5 days, same as the common cold.
6. On Jan. 31, 2020, we find Fauci’s first mention of his key worry, namely that the virus would be traced to his research. He says this is a conspiracy theory and crazy but he also had a problem. Many scientists were saying that the virus looked manufactured. He has assembled a team to prove otherwise, with the result of the famous “Proximal Origin” paper published weeks later.
7. Fauci’s first meeting with Trump in the Oval Office was Feb. 6. Fauci used the occasion to urge him to ask Xi Jinping for an invitation to tour Wuhan, a junket arranged by the World Health Organization. This trip, attended by Fauci aide Clifford Lane, returned a glowing report of how China handled the virus. Fauci reports on this in the entry of Feb. 6, 2020.
8. Meanwhile, on Feb. 8, 2020, Fauci got word that the case fatality rate was not 2–3 percent but 0.2 percent, in line with a bad flu and hardly justifying a CCP-like response. Fauci later exaggerated the “mortality rate” as ten times the annual flu.
9. The head of NIH went to the Cayman Islands as the crisis was breaking, really at the most critical point. Vacation in a tax haven and major hub for private banking? Maybe. Entry from Feb. 23, 2020.
10. For most Americans, the day March 16, 2020, was the start of the great reset when the federal government issued guidelines to close all places where people gather and otherwise stand six feet apart. For Fauci, who had worked on this plan for weeks or much longer, this was just another day.
11. It was Fauci who takes credit for stopping Easter celebrations in 2020. Entry from April 4, 2020:
12. The April 23, 2020, entry is very important. Trump fully realized that he had been hornswoggled. This is the moment of the great turning. Also this is a completely new revelation. Trump flipped from tolerating the lockdowns for fear of the political implications of downplaying the virus toward wanting to end them.
13. On June 15, 2020, Fauci urges that Trump should not hold campaign rallies.
14. Fauci had doubts about Moderna but the company was already tagged from mid-January to manufacture the inoculation…
15. Once the summer of protest fun was over, Fauci was back in business, calling California governor Newsom’s health adviser to urge longer lockdowns. Notice how it is always the religious and patriotic holidays that are cancelled.
16. On Oct. 2, 2020, Donald Trump was hospitalized for COVID. Fauci says Trump took Remdesivir. Fauci had earlier warned against this drug for COVID on grounds that it has no benefit in previous uses and could be toxic.
18. In case anyone had any doubt, Fauci thinks that anyone who voted for Trump in 2020 was crazy. Just consider this. He served in the Trump administration and played a huge role in getting Trump to greenlight and then extend the lockdowns.
19. Already by Jan. 9, 2021, before mass distribution of the shots, Fauci knew that the mutations were outrunning the formula. Again, nothing surprising here and entirely predictable. This was a turning point for Fauci because his plan to be valorized for releasing the cure was failing.
20. Jan. 12, 2021, a plan falls into place: mRNA to outrun mutations.
A few days later, Fauci reinforced this with new information. This has “major implications for vaccine development” he says.
21. It was Jan. 14, 2021, when Fauci received a message from one of the world’s most respected virologists, David Ho, that the Delta variant could render the vaccines “useless.”
22. The news got worse two months later with evidence that there is fetal exposure to mRNA injections. Fauci is mainly upset about the implications for public relations.
23. Fauci had a pulmonary embolism June 19, 2021, most certainly a vaccine injury.
24. Here is the moment when Fauci realized (or was willing to admit) that the shot was not even plausibly effective.
25. There is a group of 50 doctors called the “TV Doctors” who meet to get instructions. Can’t make this stuff up. Not a conspiracy at all.
26. Incredibly, Fauci got mixed up in the FTX scam. This is from July 17, 2022, leading to the midterms of which SBF was a major funder.
27. For his part, Fauci just wanted to sell a product, even if it was useless at best and probably dangerous. Plus, the news would undermine the mandates.
Fauci retired in December. His problems have not ended in the three and a half years since. There is still no serious reckoning with what happened. The release of this giant manuscript is a beginning as are the hearings held by Senator Rand Paul. It’s a moment of revelation, catharsis, truth-telling, and coming to terms with the disaster created in these years from which the nation and the world have yet to recover.
Every citizen needs to read these diaries, slowly while reliving one’s own experience. Keep in mind that the suffering of the people is never noted in all these pages. But they were noted in your own life, bitterly etched in your memory. Even in the next century, there will be people talking about their two terrible years in childhood, forced to wear a mask and then jabbed with gene therapy.
Anthony Fauci sought immortality through power and fame. His only power now is his right to remain silent; his immortality is earned in infamy.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.