Rand Paul on Fauci diary entries: 'Level of dishonesty is really astounding'

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has published Dr. Anthony Fauci's private diary from when he led the nation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, says that the entries reveal a 'level of dishonesty' that is 'really astounding.'

'One of the biggest items that we found in there was that in January of 2020 he already was acknowledging that the virus didn't originate in the marketplace. For years he's been telling you -- if you interviewed him last week, he's probably still telling you -- the reason we think it came from nature is because they had these exotic animals and that's where SARS came from previously,' Paul told reporters at the Capitol on Monday.

Paul said critics of Fauci's work have 'known' that COVID-19 likely jumped from animals to people before it spread through a wet market in Wuhan, China, where vendors sold live animals, such as pangolins.

'The earliest people who got COVID were not associated with the marketplace. The Chinese CDC was saying this in January of 2020. He knew it, he told dear diary, but to the public, he commissioned this paper called 'Proximal Origins,' and in it they go on and on saying it's implausible that it came from the lab and we're really convinced it came from these wild animals in the marketplace,' Paul told reporters.

'That level of dishonesty is really astounding,' he said.

Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci's notes from his investigation into whether the COVID-19 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China or from a marketplace that sold exotic animals.

Fauci wrote in his diary in January 2020 that 'we know the market was not the source' but instead the 'amplifier' of COVID's spread.

Paul has accused Fauci of lying about gain-of-function research into dangerous viruses at the Chinese lab and subpoenaed the 85-year-old former health official to testify before his committee on Wednesday.

'Still not convinced [Anthony Fauci] lied about gain-of-function research or the origins of COVID? Look no further than his own words,' Paul posted on the social platform X.

Paul also said on social media that his investigation into Fauci shows that he 'put protecting his reputation ahead of protecting the American people.'

Paul and Fauci have long battled over the Kentucky senator's claim that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that may have led to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul has asserted that NIH funds were funneled to the Wuhan lab while Fauci has denied that NIH funded that work.