Fauci's Personal Diary Highlights Shocking Contradiction On COVID Fatality Rate

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to the president, appears to have misled Congress about the coronavirus fatality rate in the early days of the pandemic, making statements in private that contradicted his public testimony. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) released a trove of previously private Fauci diaries ahead of his expected testimony this Wednesday before a key oversight committee. A February 8, 2020, journal entry shows Fauci recounting a phone call with former CDC Director Tom Frieden in which he compared the novel coronavirus to a "bad influenza" and predicted a lower-than-expected fatality rate. "Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak. He and I are on the same page in thinking tht this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%," he wrote. About a month later, at a March 11 hearing, Fauci responded to a question from Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX): "The seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent. The stated mortality overall of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three," Fauci told the panel. "I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu." The newly revealed contradictions come after The Daily Wire reported Fauci's obsession with media attention. "Press still hot and heavy about me," Fauci wrote on April 7, 2020.