"What idiots those guys at USAMRIID are. This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place."
That's not a whistleblower. That's not a leaked email from a disgruntled employee. That's Dr. Anthony Fauci — former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — writing in his own diary in March 2016 about a U.S. Army lab that aerosolized the Ebola virus. With money his agency provided.
Four years later, that same man locked your kids out of school and told you to trust the science.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul released the diary entries and internal NIAID emails this week, and the picture they paint is worse than the headline suggests. Fauci wasn't just aware that the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick was engineering Ebola to reach the lungs through aerosol exposure — a pathway the virus doesn't naturally take. He was furious it wasn't classified. Not furious it happened. Furious people might find out.
His diary continues: "Now I have to speak with the NSC from the SKIF tomorrow to pick up the doo-doo and explain why this is an irrelevant experiment." The National Security Council. A sensitive compartmented information facility. For an experiment he says never should have been done — but which his own agency funded through the Department of Defense.
The study itself used groups of four monkeys, comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated animals exposed to aerosolized Ebola — a pathogen roughly 50 times deadlier than COVID. The unvaccinated animals showed different inflammation patterns, and the results were apparently problematic enough that Fauci's instinct wasn't transparency. It was containment.
"If someone does not tell me the truth and I find out they did not, then they are gone," he wrote. The concern wasn't the experiment. The concern was managing the information.
Paul's committee voted 8-7 along party lines to release the documents, and the chairman didn't mince the implications. "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 told Just The News.
The emails that accompanied the diary entries reveal more. NIAID scientist Peter Jahrling wrote that his team would "continue to make plans to initiate the CoV study as soon as the lights turn green" — a reference to coronavirus research that predates the pandemic by years. The pipeline from dangerous pathogen research to "wait for the green light" was already built and humming inside Fauci's agency while the public had no idea any of it existed.
The standard defense writes itself: these were legitimate national security research programs, the kind of work that keeps America ahead of biological threats. But Fauci's own words betray that framing. He didn't call it critical research. He called it something that "never should have been done." He didn't push for peer review or public accountability. He pushed for classification. And when the results came back ugly, his instinct was to call the researchers idiots — not for doing the work, but for letting it become visible.
President Trump has since signed an executive order banning gain-of-function research. President Biden, in his final days, granted Fauci a pardon. Paul has introduced the Risky Research Review Act to impose congressional oversight on exactly this kind of program.
Fauci spent 2020 and 2021 on television telling Americans that questioning government science was dangerous. His diary tells a different story — one where the head of America's infectious disease agency privately admitted his own shop was funding experiments that terrified him, then worked the phones to make sure nobody else found out.
The pardon arrived before the diary did. The timing speaks for itself.
