Personal records released by a Senate committee show Anthony Fauci privately discussed a COVID-19 fatality rate of 0.2% to 0.3% in February 2020, one month before telling Congress the virus could have a mortality rate near 1% after accounting for mild and asymptomatic infections.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Newly released personal notes show Dr. Anthony Fauci privately discussed a COVID-19 case fatality rate substantially lower than the estimate he presented to Congress several weeks later as federal officials warned that the emerging virus was far more lethal than seasonal influenza.
Fauci’s Feb. 8, 2020, diary entry documented a telephone conversation with former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden. According to the notes, the two officials believed the number of infections was significantly larger than the confirmed case count, which would have reduced the percentage of infected people who died.
“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 [sic] 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%,” Fauci wrote.
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Approximately one month later, on March 11, 2020, Fauci appeared before the House Oversight Committee as the coronavirus spread beyond China and reached Europe and the United States. He told lawmakers that available data indicated an overall mortality rate of approximately 3%, though he said accounting for infections involving few or no symptoms could lower the figure to about 1%.
“The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data, including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and three,” Fauci told the committee.
“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,” Fauci continued. “I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand.”
The contrast between Fauci’s private February assessment and his public March testimony emerged from more than 1,141 pages of records released by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the committee’s chairman, made the materials public before Fauci testified earlier in the week. During that appearance, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 110 times and declined to answer substantive questions.
Fauci maintained detailed records of meetings, telephone calls and other activities while serving as one of the federal government’s most prominent health officials during the pandemic. He was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force during President Donald Trump’s first administration.
Republicans have scrutinized Fauci’s actions for years, including his role in recommendations involving school closures, social distancing and other measures adopted during the early pandemic response.
Dr. Harvey Risch, chairman of the Trump administration’s Cancer Panel at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the difference between the private and public estimates reflected broader problems within the public health establishment.
“The fact that he knew this and couldn’t say the truth in public means he had other interests to pursue,” Risch said during an appearance on the “Just the News, No Noise” television program.
“And, I think the worst one of all the ones […] was his estimate of the fatality rate of COVID that he was saying publicly it was one to 2%, stirring up fear and anxiety, while privately he was writing that it was a 10th of a percent, which is like a bad flu and would not have generated the same anxiety in the general public had he spoken the truth,” Risch added.
The records also provide new details about early discussions among Fauci and other scientists regarding the possibility that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory.
Fauci’s alleged Feb. 1, 2020, personal notes describe a telephone conference that preceded the publication of the “Proximal Origin” paper, which presented a natural origin as the credible explanation for the virus’ emergence.
According to the notes, most of the scientists participating in the call were not prepared to dismiss the possibility that the virus’ ability to infect humans had resulted from engineering or laboratory activity.
Only two of approximately a dozen scientists were “sure that this could occur naturally, and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this,” Fauci wrote.
The records indicate that Fauci did not initially accept the Chinese wet-market explanation, and that most of the scientists he consulted also had questions about that theory during the opening weeks of 2020. Critics have accused him of later attempting to suppress public discussion of a possible laboratory origin.
The diary pages also describe Fauci’s reaction to the extensive media attention he received as the outbreak expanded in March 2020. Fauci noted the press coverage and commented on the media’s tendency to side with him during public disagreements with Trump.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield said the newly released material supported allegations that federal officials misled Americans about several aspects of the pandemic response, including the effectiveness of the vaccines and the origin of the virus.
“This vaccine never prevented infection, so when people said ‘vaccinate your children so they don’t infect grandma,’ that was just a false statement. So very unfortunate,” Redfield told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast.
“The American public was definitely misled. [Fauci] definitely had an intentional role, unfortunately, in misleading the American public around the origin of the virus, for sure, around the efficacy of the vaccines, and it’s really sad,” Redfield added.
The Senate committee’s document release offers the most extensive public account to date of Fauci’s private activities and conversations during the earliest stages of the pandemic. The records are likely to intensify congressional examination of whether his public statements accurately reflected what he and other health officials were privately discussing at the time.
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