In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive deep into the 1,141-page collection of Anthony Fauci’s private typewritten notes (December 2019–December 2022) released by Senator Rand Paul’s office.

Most media coverage has been surface-level and dismissive. Simone spent significant tokens analyzing the full (scanned, hard-to-read) document. What emerges is far more revealing: Fauci’s early private concerns about lab-origin possibilities and gain-of-function research he helped fund, how the narrative hardened over time, his internal framing of expert disagreements, the evolution of mask guidance, vaccine safety signals he tracked privately, and the surreal personal side of sudden celebrity (bobbleheads, prayer candles, celebrity encounters, and more).

We walk through the actual quotes so you can judge for yourself. The full original PDF is linked in the show notes.

This is one of the clearest windows we’ve had into how the official COVID narrative was managed from the inside.

Show Notes

Here is the original PDF.

What People are Saying About This

The mainstream/leftist response to this is that Republicans are out on a Fauci-themed witch hunt.

In response to someone asking “what’s going on with anthony fauci and his diary?” on r/OutOfTheLoop, Bignholy (who posted the top-voted comment) wrote:

Rand Paul got ahold of Fauci’s private notes internal nonpublic notes from the COVID era. The current GOP being what it is, they are now trying to use that to push for punishing Fauci based on the fact that he wrote in it some things that don’t match the final statements made by the CDC back during COVID.

When Fauci was called in to yet again to be questioned yet again by the same people who ignored him and tried to prosecute him previously, he flat out said that they are now seeking to entrap him for political reasons, and plead the 5th rather than play along. Quote from the article, for those who come after and don’t want to click the bloody link:

“However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote,” Fauci said.

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said.

“Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

Original-Rush139 added: “I only read through January of 2020 but he seemed convinced the market was where the virus spread not originated. I didn’t see any hypothesis about its origin. People don’t get that he was very careful in public to talk about the data he had. China covered everything up so there never was and never will be data about the origin.”

Virus Origins

What does Dr. Fauci write about the origins of the COVID-19 virus? Does he seriously entertain the idea that it was a lab leak?

* On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote about the Wuhan wet market: “It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market... Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

* The more striking entries come from January 31, 2020. Fauci describes a call from Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar, conferenced with evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen: “There have been conspiracy theories that the virus was given GOF by inserted mutations and deliberately or accidentally released in Wuhan... The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the 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.”

* On February 1, 2020, Fauci convened a larger group of virologists (Andersen, Holmes, Drosten, Fouchier, Garry, Rambaut, and others) to debate it. His notes are unambiguous that opinion was split: “There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally... Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

* By February 6, 2020, a National Academies review he’d helped set up “decided that there was no clear evidence of malfeasance, but it should be looked into.”

* Later in 2020 and through 2022 he becomes increasingly confident in natural origin, more dismissive of the lab-leak camp

* Looking back on June 7, 2021, he reiterated that he wasn’t the one who raised the lab-leak possibility — the scientists briefed him: “I was briefed by them... After a considerable amount of discussion about half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence. A few weeks later Christian Andersen got together with Bob Garry and Andrew Rambaut... and they came to the conclusion that... this was a natural occurrence.”

* On May 23, 2021, after Andersen told him the NIH-funded Wuhan work wasn’t gain-of-function, Fauci wrote he felt “much better now that he is in total support of what I have been saying.”

* The most revealing entry is July 7, 2021, describing a National Security Council briefing with Beth Cameron and Maher Bitar: “it became clear that the FBI has no idea what they’re talking about since they are convinced that the origin of COVID-19 is from a laboratory leak. The reasons that they give do not make any sense. In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species... I emphasized that I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak. However, in this regard, I emphasized that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable.”

* When the U.S. intelligence community’s origins report came out in late August 2021, he noted: “They still left open the possibility that it could be a lab leak; However, more elements of the intelligence community felt that it was a natural occurrence compared to the single component (FBI) who seemed to feel strongly that it was a lab leak, although this is based on no data at all.”

* By July 2022, his private tone toward lab-leak proponents had hardened further. At a social event, he wrote that Fox News anchor Bret Baier “finally admitted that the 2 recent Science papers by Worobey, Andersen, Rasmussen et al convince him that the lab leak theory is really not true.” Throughout 2021–2022 he repeatedly vents about congressional critics (especially Sen. Paul) over gain-of-function funding, at one point writing the accusations were “totally mind boggling how they are distorting” the record.

So the diary shows real, serious scientific engagement with the lab-leak hypothesis at the outset, followed by growing private confidence that a natural spillover was far more likely — a middle-ground picture, not a “smoking gun” of concealment, though Senator Paul’s framing of the release argues otherwise.

What does Dr. Fauci write about gain of function (GOF) research?

* Across the diary, gain-of-function (GOF) comes up constantly from spring 2021 onward — almost always in the context of Republican senators and outside scientists accusing NIAID of funding GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that they claim caused the pandemic. Fauci’s own position stays consistent: NIAID’s EcoHealth Alliance subaward funded work that some experts call gain-of-function under a loose definition, but it did not meet the government’s official regulatory definition (P3CO), and — critically — the viruses studied could not have evolved into SARS-CoV-2.

* On May 19, 2021, he wrote: “One of the real problems is that people are conflating whether or not we approved gain of function research for Wuhan and the possibility that the Chinese created SARS-C0V-2 in the laboratory. Whether or not one agrees as to the conduct of gain of function research, when you look at the bat viruses that was studied under the grant and compare the genetic sequences with SARS-CoV-2 it becomes clear that SARS-CoV-2 could not have come from the bat viruses associated with the grant that was funded.”

* Later, describing the Oct. 21–23, 2021 controversy over a late EcoHealth progress report showing mice getting sicker in the study, he wrote (Oct. 23, 2021): “Larry made it very clear that the research did not rise to the scrutiny of P3CO. In other words by our definition, it was not gain of function.” That “by our definition” caveat is the crux of his position — he acknowledges the science is ambiguous by loo...