Newly released diary entries show former White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci believed President Donald Trump’s decision to halt federal funding for research in Wuhan helped fuel suspicions about COVID-19’s origins and accusations against Fauci himself.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci privately blamed President Donald Trump for intensifying public suspicion that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory, according to diary entries released by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Wednesday.
The newly disclosed documents, covering December 2021 through May 2022, reveal Fauci’s views on the origins controversy, the termination of federal research funding involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology and his increasingly public dispute with Republican lawmakers.
In a March 21, 2022, entry, Fauci identified the dispute as an important subject for his planned memoir, arguing that tensions between Trump and China had fueled suspicions about a possible laboratory accident.
“****Very important issue to discuss in the book. The entire controversy with China as the source of the outbreak and the lab leak theory stems from the tension between Trump and China,” Fauci wrote. <Cite ref=”turn649862view0″/>
Fauci specifically criticized Trump’s April 2020 decision to terminate a National Institutes of Health grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that collaborated with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Please remember that when it was brought to the attention of Trump that the NIH was funding a grant at Wuhan where the outbreak was first recognized, Trump ordered, with no evidence to support any suspicion, that we cancel the grant,” he wrote.
Fauci maintained that the cancellation was unjustified and said subsequent funding conditions made it difficult for EcoHealth to continue its research.
He also argued that the controversy contributed to public criticism of EcoHealth President Peter Daszak and complicated efforts to investigate the pandemic’s origins.
“This led both to the deomization [sic] of Peter Dascak [sic] of EcoHealth and to an emergence of the theory of a lab leak and clouded the picture of our ability to further investigate the very likely cause of the outbreak which was a natural jumping of virus from an animal species to human,” Fauci wrote.
The former health official further described himself as a target of political accusations because of his disagreements with Trump during the pandemic.
“Because I am the director of NIAID and was involved in somewhat of a conflict publicly with Trump, I then became the focal point of the building conspiracy theory that somehow or other NIH played a role in the outbreak,” he wrote.
The entries offer insight into Fauci’s personal interpretation of the political controversy but do not establish how COVID-19 originated or demonstrate that Trump was responsible for the emergence of the laboratory-origin hypothesis.
EcoHealth Alliance’s federally funded research has since faced extensive congressional scrutiny over experiments involving bat coronaviruses, grant reporting and oversight of work performed in Wuhan.
In 2024, then-NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak acknowledged during congressional testimony that certain experiments supported through EcoHealth met the broad scientific definition of gain-of-function research, although disagreements remain over how those experiments should be classified under federal funding restrictions.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic also investigated EcoHealth’s failure to submit required progress reports on time and concerns about its monitoring of research conducted by international collaborators.
Those findings eventually contributed to federal action against the organization and its leadership.
In January 2025, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services formally debarred EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak from federal funding for five years, citing serious failures to comply with grant requirements and adequately oversee research activities.
The department concluded that the restrictions were necessary to protect federal interests. The administrative action did not establish that EcoHealth’s research caused the pandemic.
Other documents have raised questions about the extent of research planned by EcoHealth and its collaborators.
A 2018 proposal called DEFUSE, developed with researchers connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the University of North Carolina, outlined experiments involving modified bat coronaviruses. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency did not approve the proposal for funding.
The project’s existence has contributed to debate about laboratory research involving potentially dangerous pathogens, but it does not demonstrate that the proposed experiments were performed or produced SARS-CoV-2.
Fauci consistently favored a natural spillover explanation, in which the virus crossed from animals into humans, while rejecting accusations that he knowingly supported research responsible for the outbreak.
Scientists and intelligence agencies have reached differing assessments of the pandemic’s origins, and no publicly established evidence has conclusively resolved whether the virus emerged through natural transmission or a laboratory-associated incident.
Paul’s release adds to congressional scrutiny of Fauci’s handling of the origins debate and federal oversight of coronavirus research.
The diary entries show that Fauci privately viewed Trump’s intervention in the Wuhan grant controversy as a major factor in the political dispute surrounding COVID-19. They also highlight the continuing disagreement over whether concerns about laboratory research received adequate consideration during the pandemic’s early years.
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