Healthcare

Fauci Wanted Trump Impeached Over Border Wall, Misled Public About Ebola Vaccine, Diary Entries Reveal

(Official White House Photo by Erin Scott)

Newly available diary entries from former National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci further undermine his media mythology as a scrupulous scientist and apolitical civil servant whose policies during the COVID-19 pandemic rested on the best available science.

Sen. Rand Paul released new documents containing Fauci’s diary entries for the years 2015 to 2019 on Wednesday.

Media stories during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic often portrayed Fauci as “America’s doctor”: a nonpartisan bureaucrat who had served under Democrats and Republicans alike, a government official more interested in safeguarding public health than his personal politics. But his private writings show something else. Fauci strongly opposed President Donald Trump.

“Trump insisting on $5 billion for his wall on Mexico border. He is acting more and more bizarre. Should be impeached, but Dems are rightfully concerned that this will galvanize his base,” Fauci wrote in January 2019, about a year before the pandemic hit.

The documents also contain evidence that Fauci misled the public about an Ebola vaccine in the midst of an outbreak in West Africa.

The World Health Organization declared that its Ebola vaccine had demonstrated “up to 100% efficacy in individuals” in July 2015.

“This is a remarkable result which shows the power of equitable international partnerships and flexibility,” said Jeremy Farrar, then the Director of the Wellcome Trust, who would later privately work with Fauci to shape the narrative about COVID. “We, and all our partners, remain fully committed to giving the world a safe and effective vaccine.”

Farrar became a central figure in efforts with Fauci to suppress global discussion of a laboratory accident in Wuhan. He served as the chief scientific officer of the WHO from 2023 to 2025. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fauci privately wrote of “multiple flaws in the design and the analysis of the data” supporting the Ebola vaccine candidate and a “terribly flawed study design.”

But in media appearances on CNN, BBC, and PBS, and in an interview with the New York Times, he praised the vaccine anyway, Paul’s staff indicate in the document release.

“The data, strictly speaking, are not statistically significant,” Fauci wrote. “Bottom line is that we are dealing with an inherently good and effective vaccine that was put into a terribly flawed study design … Such is life….”

“We cannot criticize the study since that is exactly what the press is looking for and that will create tension between HHS and WHO. HHS is too stupid to realize that,” Fauci wrote.

The diary entry does not state why he believed it was effective.

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Office of Vaccines Research and Review Director Phil Krause had expressed concerns about the study design to Fauci, the diary entry notes.

Krause would go on to resign from the FDA amid pressure by the Biden administration to approve COVID-19 booster shots in young and healthy Americans, a decision Fauci also promoted. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The documents suggest that Fauci clashed with some officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about this messaging. But Fauci appealed to Leslie Dach, a former Clinton administration official and Walmart executive who at the time served as a senior counselor to HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, to overrule them.

“HHS COMMs … is getting all bent out of shape trying to micromanage what I say on TV and even tried to shut me down on TV but I appealed to Leslie Dach who gave me the go-ahead,” Fauci wrote.

Dach, who could not be reached for comment, now serves as the chair of Democrat dark money group Protect Our Care.

The group organizes protests against changes to Medicaid and has recently been central to Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro’s public statements about measles in Pennsylvania.

As chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Paul has pursued an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, its ties to the U.S. government, and Fauci’s involvement in suppressing discussion of the possibility of a lab leak.

Documents released by Paul’s committee in September show that in the spring of 2016, the U.S. military discovered that vaccinated primates exposed to aerosolized Ebola showed lung injury that unvaccinated primates did not, rattling African embassies and flustering Fauci.

The documents do not clearly name the precise vaccine candidates tested. They do indicate that an earlier study had uncovered the same worrying vaccine-induced lung injury in a vaccine made by Profectus. The documents also refer to Crucell, now Janssen, the drug arm of Johnson & Johnson, which codeveloped an Ebola vaccine with Fauci’s institute.