Senator Rand Paul, Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has released more than 1,100 pages of pandemic-era diary entries kept by Dr Anthony Fauci, the former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, just ahead of a Senate hearing at which Fauci has been subpoenaed to testify about the origins of Covid-19. Paul argues the entries expose discrepancies between what Fauci wrote privately and what he told the public, and suggests they point to an attempt to play down evidence for a laboratory leak in Wuhan. Fauci's legal team has rejected this characterisation, describing Paul's efforts as a "years-long public crusade" against him, setting the stage for a combative appearance on Capitol Hill.

The diary entries span December 2019 to December 2022, alongside a separate 465-page "prequel" document covering 2001 to 2015. The material was briefly posted online, taken down, and then reposted with redactions. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a long-standing critic of Fauci, said the records had been retrieved from 11 separate servers. Among the passages highlighted is a May 2020 entry in which Fauci wrote that "the situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable." While mainstream scientific opinion continues to favour a natural origin for the virus, the lab-leak theory remains a live and contested issue, and the hearing is expected to reignite debate over how the pandemic's early days were handled and communicated.