Senator Rand Paul released a 1,141-page collection of Dr Anthony Fauci's pandemic-era diary entries over the weekend, days ahead of Fauci's scheduled Senate testimony on 29 July 2026. Paul, who chairs a Senate committee investigating COVID-19's origins, argues the notes show Fauci privately entertained doubts about a natural origin that conflicted with his public reassurances, fuelling long-running claims of a cover-up around the lab-leak theory. The document was posted on Paul's website but had been taken down by Monday.

The entries span December 2019 to December 2022. In one from 26 January 2020, Fauci wrote that the initial infection "was not connected to the market" and that "the market was not the source, it was the amplifier," while still describing an animal-to-human jump. A 1 February 2020 entry recorded that only two of twelve scientists on a conference call backed a natural origin, with the rest open to "deliberate insertion." Fauci has maintained that evidence points to a spillover at Wuhan's wet market, a view most virologists surveyed in February 2024 shared, while experts such as Dartmouth's Felicia Goodrum note that early scientific uncertainty reflects normal research evolution rather than wrongdoing.