Fauci’s Bird Flu Dress Rehearsal for COVID-19
By Peter Navarro | The Daily Signal | October 17, 2026
“As usual, I must publicly defend the President’s position, but I work behind the scenes.”
That is what Anthony Fauci wrote in his private diary in July 2002. The president he was quietly working around was George W. Bush. Eighteen years later, America would watch Fauci stand at a podium beside President Donald Trump and nod along. What America never saw, until his own diary came out, was Fauci working “as usual” and “behind the scenes” to undermine Trump—and cover his own tracks.
I expose that treachery in my new book, “Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison.” And here is what still has not been told. What Fauci did to this country in 2020 was not improvisation. He had run the entire play eight years earlier, on a different virus, and he wrote down every move of that dress rehearsal.
In December 2011, Fauci records that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he led, paid two laboratories—Ron Fouchier’s in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka’s in Wisconsin—to take H5N1 bird flu, in his words “highly lethal (60%), but poorly transmissible,” and make it “become transmissible and maintain lethality in a mammal model (ferret).”
Read that twice. That flu killed roughly six of every 10 people known to have caught it. The one thing holding it back was that it did not spread. Fauci wanted to find out if that could change. No president ever went to the American people and asked permission to make bird flu transmit more effectively. No voter ever approved it. But one unelected man thought it was a good idea.
Eight years later, his institute’s money was running through a New York outfit called EcoHealth Alliance into the Wuhan Institute of Virology—gain-of-function coronavirus work, building chimeric viruses in humanized mice, reportedly alongside scientists associated with the People’s Liberation Army.
Then the unfavorable news got out. In 2012, the bird flu/ferret data began drawing attention, and the story went around the world. In 2020 it was worse. On Jan. 31, some of the best virologists alive got Fauci on the phone and told him the new virus looked engineered—that the spike protein mutations at the furin cleavage site, in the words of Fauci’s diary, “could not have occurred naturally.”
It seems Fauci’s worry in January 2012 was not that his laboratories might have built an airborne killer. It was, in his own hand, that “outside (non-scientific) influences would force us to set a bad precedent and stop funding these flu projects.”