Newly released diary entries from Anthony Fauci show the longtime federal health official privately calling for President Donald Trump’s impeachment during the 2019 border-wall fight while also expressing concerns about the design and statistical strength of a widely promoted 2015 Ebola vaccine trial.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
WASHINGTON — Newly released diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci show that the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director privately supported impeaching President Donald Trump during a 2019 dispute over border-wall funding and expressed significant reservations about the design of a high-profile Ebola vaccine trial that he nevertheless publicly described favorably.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the new documents Wednesday as part of his continuing investigation into Fauci’s government service, infectious-disease research and the federal response to COVID-19.
The records cover portions of Fauci’s diary from 2015 through 2019.
In an entry from January 2019, during a partial government shutdown over Trump’s demand for billions of dollars for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Fauci wrote:
“Trump insisting on $5 billion for his wall on Mexico border. He is acting more and more bizarre. Should be impeached, but Dems are rightfully concerned that this will galvanize his base.”
The entry documents Fauci’s private political opinion about Trump roughly a year before the COVID-19 pandemic made Fauci one of the most visible members of the administration’s public-health response.
Other previously released entries show that Fauci had criticized Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, including his debate performance and the release of the “Access Hollywood” recording.
The newly released material also contains a separate episode involving an experimental Ebola vaccine during the 2014-2016 West African outbreak.
In July 2015, the World Health Organization announced interim results from a Guinea trial of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, saying it had shown “100% efficacy in individuals” while cautioning that additional evidence was needed to establish broader protection. The WHO described the findings as highly promising and continued the trial.
Jeremy Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, called the finding “a remarkable result” and praised the international collaboration behind the trial.
Fauci’s diary shows that he was considerably more skeptical about the underlying study design.
He wrote of “multiple flaws in the design and the analysis of the data” and described the trial as having a “terribly flawed study design.”
“The data, strictly speaking, are not statistically significant,” Fauci wrote.
He nevertheless added: “Bottom line is that we are dealing with an inherently good and effective vaccine that was put into a terribly flawed study design … Such is life….”
The distinction is important.
Fauci’s notes do not show that he believed the vaccine itself was ineffective. They show that he believed the evidence generated by that particular trial had methodological shortcomings while still concluding that the vaccine was likely effective.
Subsequent evaluations of the Guinea ring-vaccination trial identified legitimate statistical and design questions. One later National Academies review found that some analyses of the interim data were inconclusive depending on the statistical method used, while later published results continued to show strong evidence of protection among vaccinated participants.
The vaccine ultimately became a major tool against Ebola and was later licensed.
What has drawn Paul’s scrutiny is Fauci’s private discussion about whether those methodological concerns should be aired publicly.
“We cannot criticize the study since that is exactly what the press is looking for and that will create tension between HHS and WHO,” Fauci wrote. “HHS is too stupid to realize that.”
The diary indicates that FDA vaccine official Philip Krause had raised concerns with Fauci about the design of the Ebola study.
Fauci also wrote that communications officials at the Department of Health and Human Services were attempting to limit what he said publicly about the vaccine.
“HHS COMMs … is getting all bent out of shape trying to micromanage what I say on TV and even tried to shut me down on TV but I appealed to Leslie Dach who gave me the go-ahead,” Fauci wrote.
Dach was serving at the time as a senior counselor to HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell.
The diary entries cited by Paul’s staff indicate that Fauci subsequently appeared on CNN, BBC, PBS and in an interview with The New York Times discussing the Ebola vaccine favorably despite his private concerns about the trial design.
That does not by itself establish that Fauci knowingly gave the public false information about the vaccine’s effectiveness.
The documents instead show that he privately believed the trial had serious methodological weaknesses while publicly emphasizing what he considered the more important conclusion — that the vaccine itself appeared to work.
The WHO also publicly acknowledged limitations at the time. Its July 2015 announcement said the interim results showed up to 100% efficacy in vaccinated individuals but stressed that “more conclusive evidence is needed” about population-level protection.
Later analyses of the vaccine supported substantial effectiveness. A review of the final Guinea trial reported that no Ebola cases occurred among vaccinated participants beginning 10 days after vaccination, consistent with a strong protective effect.
The newly released records therefore sharpen a different question: whether Fauci should have disclosed his methodological concerns publicly while discussing the study with the media.
Paul has argued that the diary demonstrates a broader pattern in which Fauci privately expressed doubts or concerns that were not always reflected in his public messaging.
The senator has made Fauci and NIAID a central focus of his oversight work.
In September, Paul’s committee released records involving NIAID-funded Ebola experiments conducted with the Defense Department. Those records showed that NIAID helped fund and design a 2015 experiment in which vaccinated monkeys were exposed to aerosolized Ebola and subsequently developed concerning lung pathology.
According to Paul’s committee, Fauci later wrote that aspects of the work should have been classified, although an internal NIAID review found classification had not been raised while the study was being designed and conducted.
The records do not clearly identify all of the vaccine candidates involved in those animal experiments.
They refer to a Profectus vaccine in earlier work and also mention Crucell, later part of Janssen, which worked with Fauci’s institute on an Ebola vaccine.
The findings are separate from the Guinea ring-vaccination trial that Fauci discussed in his 2015 diary, and the records should not be read as showing that the same vaccine was responsible for both sets of findings.
Krause, who had raised concerns about the 2015 Ebola trial according to Fauci’s diary, later became prominent during the COVID-19 vaccine debate.
He and Marion Gruber announced their departures from the FDA in 2021 amid disagreements over the Biden administration’s push for broad booster authorization. In later congressional testimony, Krause said the White House announcement of a booster timetable created pressure on FDA reviewers before the agency had received and evaluated all of the relevant data.
Fauci supported expanded COVID-19 booster use during that period.
Paul’s broader investigation has also examined Fauci’s role in pandemic-origin discussions, federal funding connected to risky virus research and internal communications concerning the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a laboratory.
The senator has accused Fauci of suppressing discussion of the laboratory-origin hypothesis. Fauci has denied misleading Congress and has said scientists appropriately considered multiple possible origins as evidence developed.
The newly released diary entries do not resolve those disputes.
They do, however, provide additional insight into Fauci’s private thinking years before COVID-19.
On Trump, the records show a senior career health official holding strongly negative personal views of the president while serving in his administration.
On Ebola, they show Fauci wrestling privately with how to communicate a promising vaccine result that he believed came from a seriously flawed study.
The diary indicates that Fauci chose not to emphasize those methodological objections publicly because he feared doing so would create conflict between HHS and WHO and undermine a vaccine he nevertheless believed was effective.
Whether that represented appropriate public-health messaging or an improper withholding of scientific uncertainty is now part of the oversight dispute Paul is pursuing through the Senate committee.
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