This past weekend, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul released a tranche of typewritten notes from Anthony Fauci, the former director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. A central figure at the heart of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as it emerged in early 2020 and unfolded in the ensuing years, Fauci has faced scrutiny, harassment, and even death threats over public perceptions of how he handled the historic disease outbreak.
Running with Paul’s packaging of the diary entries as the musings of a pre-teen, some news outlets have cast the writings as expressions of vanity, callousness, ambition, or a combination of those unsavory sentiments. “Fauci's newly released COVID diaries reveal bizarre fixation on fame as pandemic deaths mounted,” blared Fox News’s headline. “Dr. Fauci’s bizarre fame fixation as COVID deaths mounted revealed in newly released diaries,” parroted the New York Post.
These and similar stories seized on entries where Fauci relays the rapidly changing situation on the ground as researchers considered emerging data on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that was sweeping across the globe. One day, Fauci was convening a group of scientists who were digging into the genetic and structural realities of the virus, the next he was managing the public health response and the official reports regarding the origin of the pandemic. All the while, he wrestled with understanding and contextualizing the emerging facts, instructing the public and the president, and managing his public image and that of the U.S. public health apparatus.
While some may cast this as the writings of a faulty or vainglorious leader, I offer an alternate reading of the meticulous notes recorded by Fauci.
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Instead, in the (more than 1,000!) pages of Fauci’s diary I see something that the public and elected officials don’t often want or expect from scientists, especially those tasked with leading coordinated responses to health emergencies: humanity. Was Fauci unsure of how and where the pandemic was sparked—through transmission from animals in the Wuhan wet market or as a result of gain of function (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—as new information came to light? Yes. But he also revised models for this precipitating event based on the evidence at hand. And he sought the expert advice of the most qualified researchers in this country and abroad.
“There have been conspiracy theories that the virus was given GOF by inserted mutations and deliberately or accidentally released in Wuhan. One theory was written by Indian investigators that HIV sequences were inserted by a Chinese person in Canada and released in Wuhan. Everyone thinks that is crazy, but the Farrar phone call was different,” Fauci wrote on Jan. 31, 2020. “The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the [SARS-CoV-2] furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary ‘jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates.’ They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely … I suggest that we get a larger group of qualified evolutionary biologists/virologists together under the auspices of a convening body and carefully look at this.”
Did Fauci also struggle with how best to inform the U.S. public of a situation that changed on a daily basis? Yes! Did he keep close tabs on how he and the agency he led was portrayed in the media? Also yes! But I would argue that keeping one’s finger on the pulse of how and where news outlets shaped public health messages to a frightened and uncertain populace is exactly what someone in Fauci’s position should have done.
I welcome the revelations in Fauci’s diaries. For one, they show a human being who happens to be a scientist grappling with complex realities and pressures brought about by the biggest public health emergency in a generation. Also, they show that science is not a linear, error-free march toward definitive answers and iron-clad proclamations. It is iterative, messy, self-correcting, and revisionary in its core. Fundamentally, science is more the generation of questions and less the steady production of answers.
That said, I think there are still useful and elucidatory questions to ask about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic (most researchers agree that spillover from a natural source is the most likely origin),—it’s spread around the globe, and how public health officials (in the U.S. and elsewhere) responded to it. Mainly, exploring these questions serve to prepare us for the next pandemic—not if, but when—that strikes. And I applaud Fauci’s careful notetaking as the pandemic unfolded. Imagine if every federal employee kept such candid and detailed records of their thoughts and actions on a daily basis. 
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Lead image: Christopher Michel / Wikimedia Commons
