Fauci, vast majority of scientists he consulted didn't believe 'wet market' COVID origin: 'diary'

Neither Anthony Fauci nor the vast majority of scientists consulted by the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases accepted the Chinese "wet market" theory of COVID-19 origin in early 2020, before they changed the official consensus in the "Proximal Origin" paper several weeks later, according to purported Fauci diary entries published by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

"It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market," Fauci allegedly wrote in his personal notes Jan. 26, 2020 after the Chinese health minister said the novel coronavirus was spreading asymptomatically.

"Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market," Fauci allegedly wrote, referring to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market about 12 kilometers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the prime suspect for the lab-leak theory. "Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."

Fauci's alleged Feb. 1, 2020 personal notes recount the phone call that eventually produced the Proximal Origin paper, which concluded natural origin was the only credible explanation for COVID's emergence.

Only two of a dozen scientists on the call were "sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this," Fauci said, referring to the possibility that SARS-CoV-2's unusual ability to easily infect humans was engineered. One of those two worked on gain-of-function research, he said.

According to Fauci, "the rest felt that deliberate insertion [virus engineering] was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go."

Paul has not answered Just the News on the nature of Fauci's purported diary, reproduced in Paul's 1,141-page document titled "Tony's Diary Package," published Saturday afternoon. The entries begin Dec. 30, 2019.

"Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work," Paul's preface reads. "He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials. This is his own historical record containing almost-daily entries," many of which "completely undermine the official narrative that Fauci and other public health officials espoused."