In the United States, the personal diaries of Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor during the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s top infectious disease expert, have been made public. In the entries, which date back to 2020–2021, the 85-year-old scientist sharply criticizes right-wing media and journalists who spread the theory that the coronavirus was “man-made.”
The release of the diaries is connected to an American political scandal. Republican Senator Rand Paul, who has claimed for years that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, summoned Fauci to a Senate hearing and made his personal notes—exceeding 1,100 pages—public.
This involves an investigation and book by Australian journalist Sharri Markson, in which the author claimed that Chinese military scientists were developing the coronavirus as a biological weapon years before the pandemic, while Fauci’s agency was secretly funding the laboratory.
In his personal diaries, Fauci writes that these allegations “make no logical sense” and calls them a “bunch of nonsense”:
“Why would anyone want to design a virus that infects their own population just as much? There’s something wrong with this article,” Fauci wrote in May 2021.
A subsequent independent investigation confirmed that the “dangerous military document” cited by the journalist was actually an old 2015 conspiracy book freely available on the internet, which serious scientists do not endorse.
Today, debates in scientific and political circles regarding the origins of Covid-19 continue. Two main theories exist:
Natural origin — the virus was transmitted naturally to humans from a wild animal (likely a bat). Laboratory incident — the virus accidentally escaped from researchers at the Wuhan Institute during their work.
Although part of U.S. intelligence rules out a laboratory incident, the political debate surrounding this issue remains highly active in the U.S.
