The former NIAID director’s personal recounting contradicts his public statements
By Peter Navarro | Washington Times | July 28, 2026
The Anthony S. Fauci diary, just released by Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, is the talk of the town. With nearly 60 mentions in the diary, I win, hands down, the title of White House official who most frequently challenged St. Fauci.
I challenged the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases across the board: on the China travel ban, the lab origin of COVID-19, the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and Dr. Fauci’s foolish mandatory face masks and punishing lockdowns.
For my opposition to his authoritarian edicts, Dr. Fauci calls me in his diaries “weird,” “crazy,” “arrogant” and “delusional,” along with one colorful anatomical epithet not fit to print.
Ironically, it is Dr. Fauci’s own diary that proves I was right and he was wrong. About everything.
Consider my confrontation with Dr. Fauci in the Situation Room at the dawn of the pandemic, on Jan. 28, 2020, about the China travel ban. President Trump had sent me to make the case for action. Dr. Fauci was the biggest opponent, repeatedly insisting that “travel bans don’t work.”
Yet Dr. Fauci calls me a liar and insists that he supported the ban.
Yes, Dr. Fauci eventually supported the ban, but on Jan. 26, he wrote that he and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield opposed it. A day later, he repeated his opposition to the ban in two White House meetings, and he did so again in the Situation Room.
Of course, changing your mind is not a lie. Pretending you never held the original position — and smearing the person who remembers it — is.
Consider next the lab theory of COVID-19. On April 19, 2020, on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, I identified the likely source of the virus as a Wuhan lab leak. Dr. Fauci knew I was right. He said so in his diary.
Privately, Dr. Fauci recorded on Jan. 31 that scientists had raised the possibility of deliberate laboratory insertion followed by an accidental release. After a Feb. 1 expert call, he wrote that most participants regarded deliberate insertion as possible and that “we could not let this go.”
Yet Dr. Fauci’s diary reveals the beginnings of an institutional cover-up. He convened scientists who privately regarded laboratory manipulation and accidental release as plausible, then helped organize the scientific process that soon produced the natural-origin narrative.