Fauci’s diary of a simpy kid

Anthony Fauci returns to Capitol Hill this morning to notch up another entry for his diary, which by now we have all had the opportunity—and pleasure—to read.

There are hundreds of pages of entries in which the world’s most famous doctor—and perhaps America’s most divisive—sounds like a starstruck kid in awe of his own celebrity admirers.

The diary and Fauci’s own unexpected celebrity arc reveal a political machine broken by its compulsion to manufacture heroes and villains, like a twisted Hollywood D.C.

The truth never gets in the way of a good story. Often, it never gets an airing at all. The plot is written, its ending predetermined. All that’s left is the performance for the audience.

Dear Diary

Fauci, the retired long-serving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), including during the COVID-19 pandemic, was subpoenaed before Senator Rand Paul‘s committee for a bruising rematch with the libertarian Kentucky Republican.

Ahead of today’s hearing, Paul released to the public Fauci’s diaries from the COVID period, having acquired them through his probing of the Trump and Biden administrations’ handling of the pandemic.

The entries released are a who’s who of liberal celebrities, who rushed to Fauci when he became the protagonist of America’s fight against COVID.

There was his Zoom call in April 2020 organized by Kim Kardashian “with a whole host of movie stars and athletes,” among them Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Chris Rock, Usher, Michael Jordan, and many more.

In February 2021, Fauci was the focus of another Zoom meeting with “famous artists and entertainers” from all over the world to discuss the pandemic.

“There was some nice warm interchange between Bono and I at the beginning of the discussion and throughout,” Fauci writes.

“He mentioned that his son has started a rock band and since his son has asthma they called the band the inhalers[sic].”

In October 2021, Barbra Streisand called Fauci before a trip with her husband James Brolin, to ask about getting a booster shot.

“We had some fun on the phone joking about our mutual Brooklyn accents,” Fauci writes. “It is always good to hear from her.”

That same month, Fauci received the Leonardo da Vinci Award of the National Italian American Foundation and enjoyed what he describes as “a wonderful series of testimonials to me from an amazing group of people.”

Among them was Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola, President George W. Bush, Bono, and “many others.” Dion DiMucci even “wrote and sang a song to me.”

“Very moving and humbling,” Fauci writes.

Scores of other celebrity encounters are diligently noted throughout the COVID diaries, as Fauci grapples with—and at times enjoys, despite the clear stresses—his sudden rise to fame.

Early in 2020, he notes that “the public adulation of me has been amazing,” with White House interns “asking for selfies.”

In another entry from March 2020, Fauci notes he is now “the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable” people “in the world.”

Here is a serious man in serious rooms, quietly keeping score of who admired him as a deadly pandemic tore through the world.

Fauci’s Bobblehead Fandom

The problem isn’t that Fauci is vain. Who wouldn’t be when the world’s entertainment elite are suddenly filling up your inbox? It’s that we built a machine to make him so.

Somewhere between the novelty bobbleheads, the Saturday Night Live sketches and the adoring prime-time profiles—fueled by the usual social media frenzies—a career civil servant became a celebrity.

And celebrity runs on incentives that have nothing to do with epidemiology. Fame rewards conviction over candor, the quotable line over the accurate one, the persona over the person.

Once an official feels the pull of adulation, the instinct—for both them and their cultists—is to protect the brand. That risks corroding the one thing we needed most of all: the truth, uncertainty and all.

Paul’s Harder Questions

The latest hearing turns on much harder questions than how Fauci found his fame.

Paul argues the diaries show Fauci privately entertained a lab-leak or engineered-virus scenario in late January and early February 2020—flagging the virus’s unusual furin cleavage site, and a call on which most scientists did not back a natural origin—while dismissing the idea publicly for years.

He says Fauci misled Congress about whether U.S. funds paid for gain-of-function work in Wuhan.

Fauci’s account differs, of course. He says those early private exchanges were ordinary scientific uncertainty in a fast-moving crisis, that he has kept an open mind while judging an animal-to-human jump more likely, and that the studies NIH funded didn’t meet the government’s definition of gain-of-function research.

In 2021, he wrote it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses under that grant to have become SARS-CoV-2. The pandemic’s origin remains officially unknown, and U.S. intelligence is split.

President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci on his last day in office, to shield him from what supporters anticipated would be a witch hunt against him.

So today’s stakes are political and reputational, not criminal, though Paul believes Fauci lied under oath—which the latter rejects totally.

But once again, however the hearing pans out, Fauci will be the star of the show.

The Celebrity Autopsy of a Bureaucrat

Here, Paul repeats the era’s central error.

His Senate committee stages the releases in a “Reading Room,” under the banner that what Fauci “wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories” and “Tony’s Diary.”

That is not the register of cold institutional review, but of a reality-TV reunion, with the confessional tapes, the receipts, and the villain edit.

And it’s the same celebrity machine, merely reversed. What thrilled liberals about Fauci—the icon, the merch, the late-night love—is precisely what enrages conservatives.

What made Fauci a hero to one tribe guarantees his villainy to the other; flip the valence and the personalization runs identically.

Watch many on the right now mining the diaries not for policy but for vanity, one Fox News commentator likening Fauci to a nerd who suddenly made homecoming king.

That is celebrity autopsy dressed as oversight. It feels like accountability and delivers catharsis, even if it’s hollower on the substance than the volume implies.

What would prove this wrong?

If the diaries reveal a coordinated cover-up rather than a man uncertain in private and overconfident in public, this critique collapses and Paul’s crusade is vindicated.

That’s the test worth applying to the hearing today.

Make Fauci Boring Again

If you truly want the truth about the pandemic, the man is the least interesting part of it.

Strip away the theater and you’re left with the dull, essential stuff: the grant paperwork, the risk-assessment frameworks, the definitions Congress never pinned down, the biosecurity rules that let hazardous research proceed with too little scrutiny.

Those can be fixed, but not through a morality play about an 85-year-old whose relevance has evaporated.

Fauci should never have been a bobblehead. He should have been a bureaucrat. Make him one again, and we might finally learn something.