In March 2016, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down and wrote in his personal diary that the U.S. Army had aerosolized the Ebola virus — a pathogen with a death rate roughly 50 times that of COVID — and engineered it to be driven deep into the lungs of test monkeys at Fort Detrick. Four groups of four monkeys, four different vaccines, one terrifying delivery method that Ebola doesn't use in nature. His reaction, in his own handwriting: "What idiots those guys at USAMRIID are."
His agency funded the experiment.
That's the detail the newly released diary entries make impossible to dance around. The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases conducted aerosolized Ebola trials under a NIAID task order — meaning Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases didn't just know about the work. NIAID helped design it and wrote the check. When the results came back showing that vaccinated monkeys exposed to aerosolized Ebola actually fared worse than expected, Fauci's instinct wasn't to sound a public alarm. It was to argue the whole thing should have been classified.
"This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place," Fauci wrote. Not: this is dangerous and the public deserves to know. Not: we need to shut this down. His concern was that someone outside the building might find out.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, whose committee obtained the diary entries and released them in July, framed it plainly. "These records show NIAID was funding risky research with the Defense Department, and when the results turned problematic, Dr. Fauci argued they should have been classified," Paul said. The committee advanced the records for further investigation on an 8-7 party-line vote — every Democrat voted against releasing them.
The diary wasn't the only document that surfaced. Internal emails show NIAID scientist Peter Jahrling writing about plans to move forward with a separate coronavirus aerosol study, noting, "In the interim, however, we will continue to make plans to initiate the CoV study as soon as the lights turn green." That language — "as soon as the lights turn green" — reads less like cautious science and more like a project on a production schedule.
Fauci's own follow-up emails carried a tone that would be familiar to anyone who's watched a bureaucrat realize the paper trail exists. "If someone does not tell me the truth and I find out they did not, then they are gone," he wrote. The man who spent five years telling America to "trust the science" was privately threatening subordinates who might not tell him the truth about experiments his agency was bankrolling.
The timeline matters. These entries predate the COVID pandemic by almost four years. The same agency, the same director, the same institutional culture of funding dangerous pathogen research and then scrambling to control the narrative when the results got uncomfortable. We spent 2020 through 2024 being told that anyone who questioned the origins of COVID or the safety of gain-of-function research was a conspiracy theorist. Fauci himself sat in front of Congress and insisted NIAID never funded gain-of-function work.
The 8-7 vote to suppress that information tells you everything about which party thinks you deserve to see it.