WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former White House COVID-19 adviser, privately concluded in January 2020 that a wet market in Wuhan, China, was not the starting point of the pandemic, even as he later made public comments suggesting otherwise, according to diary excerpts released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Fauci, who was then leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in a Jan. 26, 2020, note to himself: “It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market.”
“The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread,” he wrote. “Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market.”
Fauci was even more direct in the same entry, writing, “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” while adding that he remained persuaded that “somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”
Yet during interviews in 2020 and 2021, Fauci repeatedly indicated that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, had emerged from the Wuhan wet market, a claim that became central to early public debate over the pandemic’s origins.
The passages were included in more than 1,000 pages of diary entries published Saturday by Paul. Their release drew sharp reactions from some former Trump administration officials who worked with Fauci on the White House Coronavirus Task Force in the earliest months of the COVID-19 crisis.
“I was one of the seven original members of the Coronavirus task force – stood up in January 2020 – and he never said this to us, even as the source was a subject of intense interest,” Ken Cuccinelli, who was then serving as acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote on X after the diary excerpts surfaced.
During an April 3, 2020, appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Fauci was asked whether wet markets should be shut down to reduce the risk of viruses such as COVID-19 spilling over into humans. “What we’re going through right now is a direct result of that,” he replied.
CBS News’ “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan pressed the NIAID head nearly 20 months later about whether “the place of origin was not within the market itself.”
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“I don’t think you could say that,” Fauci said on Nov. 28, 2021. “I think you could say we don’t know how and where it originated. There were wet markets in Wuhan that are ample opportunity for a virus to jump from an animal that gets brought in from all parts of China that are very closely related physically to bat enclaves in caves and come to the market.”
As late as June 2024, Fauci tripled down in congressional testimony and in his memoir that one of the Wuhan wet markets was the most likely origin of the coronavirus.
He wrote in “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service” that “experienced evolutionary virologists” who “published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature” determined “the virus emerged as a natural spillover from infected animals brought illegally into the market.”
The ex-NIAID director remained one of the foremost opponents of the so-called “lab leak theory,” along with former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, with Fauci going so far as to prompt a scientific paper attempting to debunk the hypothesis while serving on the White House COVID Task Force.
Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield, the Energy Department, FBI, CIA and other scientists have all since determined that an accidental lab leak is the most likely explanation for the pandemic’s emergence in late 2019.
Elsewhere in Fauci’s diary, the doctor fretted about asymptomatic transmission of the virus as early as Jan. 26, 2020, though publicly he downplayed the risks.
“GAME ON!!! Things are changing rapidly,” he wrote. “Dr. Ma Xiaowei, the Chinese Minister of Health gave a press statement saying that the incubation period of nCoV is 1 to 14 days and that the virus is being transmitted when people are asymptomatic!”
“This has enormous implications for how we handle people from Wuhan (like our diplomats who are now on the way back from WUHAN, having been ordered to evaculate). Should we quarantine them. I am very skeptical about the Chinese interprepation of their data,” Fauci added.
In public remarks two days later, Fauci told reporters: “The driver of respiratory outbreaks is symptomatic people, not asymptomatic carriers.”
On Wednesday, Fauci will testify before Paul’s Senate Homeland Committee about his tenure at NIAID and handling of the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fauci’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
