Personal diary entries from early 2020, reportedly kept by Dr. Anthony Fauci, suggest he privately estimated the case fatality rate of COVID-19 to be substantially lower than what he told Congress under oath weeks later. Fauci, who led the U.S. response to the pandemic as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee regarding these records.
During testimony before the House Oversight Committee on March 11, 2020, Fauci stated that the mortality rate for COVID-19 was "about three percent," adding that if minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infections were included, the rate would decrease to "somewhere around one percent." He characterized this as "10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu."
However, diary entries from February 8, 2020, indicate a different private assessment. In a note to himself, Fauci wrote that he and former CDC Director Tom Frieden discussed the outbreak and were in agreement that the virus was behaving like a "bad influenza" in terms of transmissibility. He estimated that accounting for a larger number of actual cases (a greater denominator than the reported 34,867 at the time) would place the case fatality rate closer to "0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%."
According to his diary, at that time, 34,687 cases had been recorded with 724 fatalities, equating to just over a 0.2% fatality rate.
Fauci, who retired in 2022, became a prominent public figure in the early stages of the pandemic. His diary entries also detail his growing national and international recognition, including tracking press appearances and how he was portrayed in media. He noted a "very unique and interesting relationship" with then-President Donald Trump and documented flattering media coverage, including a Washington Post article titled "Not His First Pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci Sticks to the Facts."
Fauci served as director of NIAID from 1984 until his retirement. He was a key advisor during both the Trump and Biden administrations' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fox News Digital reached out to Georgetown University, where Fauci is a distinguished professor at the school of medicine, for comment on the diary entries in comparison to his public statements. No response was received by the time of publication.