On May 21, 2020, nearly 98,000 people worldwide were dead from COVID-19. Over 27,000 of them were Americans. Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down and wrote in his diary that his fame was "explosive and really unimaginable."
He wasn't writing about the dead. He was writing about himself.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul released the diary entries on July 25, covering December 2019 through December 2022 — three years of private scribbling from the man who positioned himself as America's doctor. What Senator Paul found was less Marcus Welby, more Paris Hilton.
"My investigation uncovered that Anthony Fauci kept a diary," Paul said. "What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories."
The entries read like the journal of a teenager who just got verified on Instagram. On April 7, 2020 — with thousands dying weekly — Fauci wrote that the "press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me." He cataloged the media profiles, the television requests, the attention from world leaders and governors.
By May 21, he'd abandoned any pretense of modesty. He declared it was "not hyperbole" to say he was "the most famous and talked about person in the country." The same entry noted that President Trump "seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him" — a line that reads less like public health documentation and more like fan fiction.
Then came June 2020. The United States recorded what Fauci himself described as a record 40,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day. His diary entry for that period? He'd been invited to appear on "Dancing with the Stars."
Forty thousand cases. Cha-cha-cha.
The fame wasn't limited to TV dance competitions. Fauci sat for InStyle magazine covers. Bobbleheads bearing his likeness hit shelves. Breweries named beers after him. There were online petitions to name him "Sexiest Man Alive." Former Rep. Anna Eshoo of California called him a "national hero" and said she "felt safe in his arms." The entire apparatus of celebrity worship wrapped itself around a government bureaucrat while hospitals ran out of ventilators.
By July 2, 2020, Fauci's tone shifted — but not toward the dying. He wrote that "POTUS and his people have essentially dropped out and do not even recognize that an outbreak is ongoing." Whatever concern he had about the pandemic's trajectory, it landed in the diary alongside his ongoing inventory of personal adulation.
Senator Paul also flagged something darker than vanity. "While publicly posturing as a champion of science, he was privately directing his staff to destroy federal records," Paul said. "This is a blatant violation, a betrayal of the public trust, and further proof that Fauci engaged in a coverup from the very beginning of the pandemic."
That accusation — destroying federal records while keeping a meticulous personal diary about how famous he was — carries a particular kind of weight. Fauci apparently decided some records were worth preserving and others weren't. The ones about his celebrity? Kept. The ones about what his agency actually knew and when? Those needed destroying, according to Paul's investigation.
Fauci was subpoenaed after backing out of a voluntary appearance in June. He'll testify under oath on Wednesday, July 29, before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The diary spans three years and seven million global COVID deaths — roughly 1.2 million of them American.
Somewhere in those pages is a man who watched a pandemic kill more Americans than World War II and thought the most important thing to write down was how many magazine covers he'd landed.