A diary, Trump and COVID origins: Watch for these things as Fauci heads to Congress
A diary, Trump and COVID origins: Watch for these things as Fauci heads to Congress
Eduardo Cuevas and Erin Mansfield, USA TODAYTue, July 28, 2026 at 6:50 PM UTC
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U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, is hauling in Dr. Anthony Fauci to testify over his subpoenaed diary, his comments about President Donald Trump, and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing public health response.
Fauci, the high-ranking government virologist who became the public face of the country’s COVID-19 response, is set to appear July 29 before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Paul, the committee chairman, and his Republican colleagues have already previewed their criticism of the 85-year-old physician and scientist.
“Fauci and his team destroyed public trust in the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and our public health institutions,” Paul said in a July 28 X post. “Accountability is long overdue.”
USA TODAY has reached out to Paul's office for comment.
Ahead of the hearing, public health officials are defending Fauci, who ran the the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases under seven presidents, over how he handled emerging science on how the virus spreads, and measures that governments took to reduce its spread, even if was imperfect at the time.
Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist, told USA TODAY the hearing has already become highly partisan.
"There are those who would say this is about accountability for what happened during the pandemic," said Gounder, an editor-at-large for public health at the news site KFF, who writes the blog "Underlying Conditions." "I think others would say that this is a witch hunt in terms of what was released from Dr. Fauci's diary."
Here are three things to watch for ahead of the hearing.
Rand Paul released 1,500 pages of Anthony Fauci’s diary
Fauci’s diary contains more than 1,500 pages of excerpts memorializing his day job, and most of those pages describe internal government conversations about the coronavirus pandemic during the first Trump administration, and later in President Joe Biden’s administration.
The entries describe "unusual cases of pneumonia" appearing in China in early 2020, and how China shut down life as usual in city after city, before cases spread widely in the United States. Almost daily, Fauci wrote a tally of infections and deaths.
"GAME ON!!" he wrote Jan. 26, 2020. He referenced a briefing from a Chinese official who said "that the incubation period of (coronavirus) is 1 to 14 days and that the virus is being transmitted when people are asymptomatic!"
In other entries, Fauci criticizes Trump for re-opening the country too early and calls him "out of control." He describes a "strange" relationship in which Trump is nice to his face but then roasts him on social media. And he discusses the "unimaginable" fame he experienced.
The other one-third of what Paul released were Fauci's diary entries from 2001 through 2015. He pointed to Fauci's "role in creating the federal biodefense complex and his access to the classified world that drove it." He hasn't released diary entries for 2016 to 2019.
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The Fauci diary discusses coronavirus origin
Expect Paul to grill Fauci on the origins of the coronavirus, including the role the Wuhan Institute of Virology played and the United States' funding for the lab. Paul has been investigating the issue for years.
In diary entries from early 2020, Fauci describes "conspiracy theories" about whether someone manufactured the coronavirus that led to the pandemic, and whether that manufactured virus could have been released intentionally or unintentionally.
“I suggest that we get a larger group of qualified evolutionary biologists/virologists together under the auspices of a convening body and carefully look at this,” Fauci wrote Jan. 31, 2020. "We agreed to convene by phone the next day."
Later, in diary entries from 2021, Fauci describes facing pressure from the right, and specifically mentions Paul as someone who was fighting him. But he wrote that it was “molecularly impossible” for the money the United States gave to the Wuhan lab to have created the coronavirus.
"What I got from reading the diary is really the scientific process, which is people asking questions, formulating hypotheses," Gounder said.
A 2022 study provided evidence that the coronavirus originated in animals at a seafood market and suggested further study. The World Health Organization issued a report in 2025 saying it had more understanding of the virus' origins, but needed more information, and China wouldn't provide it.
The CIA said in 2025 that it was "more likely" that the coronavirus came from a lab than from nature, but also cautioned it had "low confidence" in that assessment. Still, the origin of the virus remains a hotly contested and highly partisan issue.
Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents related to Wuhan lab funding and released them just before leaving her post in June, and this will be the first congressional hearing on the subject since then.
Doctors come to Fauci's defense
More than 150 physicians, researchers and public health advocates signed a July 28 letter in support of Fauci and against what they called “on-going vilification and harassment of many American scientists.”
The letter said the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are attacking scientific research and evidence-based public health. Officials haven’t stopped cuts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, the letter said.
“As the Congressional hearings targeting Dr. Fauci approach, we are urging our elected representatives in Congress stop these witch-hunts and support good public health and scientific practices so that America’s leadership in innovation remains secure,” the letter said.
Gounder, the infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist, said the country hasn’t had the same reckoning with the response to the COVID-19 pandemic as it did with the 9-11 Commission, a bipartisan commission that looked into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“A congressional hearing should be about how do we do things better, how can we learn from our prior experience − both what we did right and what we did wrong,” she said. “I don’t think that’s what’s going to be the outcome of this hearing.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A diary, Trump and COVID origins: Watch for these things as Fauci heads to Congress
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