In Covid as in Climate Change: Truth Will Out

Anthony Fauci has been caught red-handed twisting science during Covid to serve an authoritarian agenda. A similar reckoning is coming for the 'scientists' who preach climate catastrophe.

The Senate oversight hearing of Dr Anthony Fauci last week offered a rare and bracing spectacle: a man once hailed as the embodiment of scientific authority (“I am the science”) reduced to invoking the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. The immediate catalyst was the release, days earlier by Republican Senator Rand Paul, of over a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary covering the pandemic years. Those entries, near-daily jottings of a public official at the height of his influence, contradict much of what he told the American people and Congress about masks, school closures, infection fatality rates and the origins of the virus itself. What had been presented as settled science now appears as a series of improvisations, self-promotions and strategic omissions.

Fauci’s private record versus public assurances

Consider the school closures that scarred a generation of children with learning losses estimated in years rather than months. In 2022 interviews Fauci insisted he had “nothing to do” with them. Yet a March 15th 2020 diary entry, emblazoned “BIG DAY!” in red ink, records how he “convinced” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools “based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight”. The same day he spoke with Ann O’Leary, chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom, Fauci noted, “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants” on the strength of the doctor’s television appearances. Later entries show Fauci urging delays in school re-openings even as data revealed children faced minimal risk and schools were not major vectors of transmission. He privately criticised governors who sought to reopen, calling Florida governor Ron DeSantis “a jerk” and “a complete disgrace”.

The human cost — speech and language delays from prolonged masking, surging mental health crises among adolescents — was waved aside in the moment of technocratic exhilaration. Fauci’s public denials of responsibility cannot erase the contemporaneous record of his enormous influence. Similar discrepancies appear on masks and infection rates. Early public statements dismissed the utility of masks for the general population; private notes later assert that officials “probably were too strong in saying masks do not work”. Diary entries also suggest Fauci’s private estimates of Covid’s infection fatality rate were lower than the figures he emphasised in congressional testimony and media appearances that fuelled public panic.

On the virus’s origins, notes from January and February 2020 reveal him privately entertaining the possibility of a laboratory incident linked to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research his own agency had helped fund through intermediaries — while publicly dismissing such notions as conspiracy theories. When pressed at the hearing on these inconsistencies, Fauci chose silence. Truth, it seems, is a luxury one can afford only when the cameras are off and the diary is locked away.