Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tore into Dr. Anthony Fauci after newly released COVID-era diaries showed the former health official privately tracking lower fatality estimates, the lab-leak debate and his own rise to pandemic fame.
The journals, released by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., gave Kennedy a new opening Monday to accuse Fauci of misleading the public and wrecking trust in public health.
Kennedy started with Fauci’s media presence. “[Fauci’s] focus was on promoting himself, on getting on TV and not doing public health,” Kennedy said on “The Ingraham Angle.”
The diary entries chronicled Fauci’s day-to-day life during the pandemic, including his belief that it was “not hyperbole” to call himself “the most famous and talked about person in the country.”
Kennedy told host Laura Ingraham that Fauci became the official voice Americans were told not to question.
RFK Jr: "Americans no longer public health, and they shouldn't" pic.twitter.com/QC3Eo1r8aF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 27, 2026
“[Fauci] was the expert that they elevated. And anybody who did not give complete blind faith to these expert opinions – which we now know were lies – was marginalized, vilified, demonized, censored,” Kennedy said.
One of the clearest conflicts in the released material involves COVID’s fatality rate.
In a February 2020 entry, Fauci privately recorded a lower estimate after speaking with Tom Frieden, writing that the virus appeared to have a much wider spread than confirmed case totals showed.
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“Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak. He and I are on the same page in thinking tht [sic] this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%,” Fauci wrote.
The following month, Fauci gave television audiences a far higher number.
During a March appearance on “Hannity,” Fauci put coronavirus mortality at “about two, two and a half percent,” though he also said it was “probably closer to one.”
“The mortality for seasonal flu is 0.1. The mortality for this is about two, two and a half percent. It’s probably lower than that. It’s probably closer to one. But even if it’s one, it’s ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu. You got to make sure that people understand,” Fauci said.
1/9 — My investigation uncovered that Anthony Fauci kept a diary.
What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.Today I'm releasing his entries from December 2019 through December 2022. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/58LvmeYkCN
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 25, 2026
Trevor Noah got the same flu comparison that month on “The Daily Show.”
“The mortality is about 0.1 percent” for seasonal flu, Fauci said.
“That’s a lot, and we get used to that morbidity and mortality, but the mortality of this is about 10 times that. It’s at least 1 percent,” he added.
Kennedy also used the diary release to revisit the origins fight that got him kicked off Instagram.
“I pointed out that [COVID-19] almost certainly came from the Wuhan lab and… my Instagram was canceled with a million followers for misinformation,” Kennedy said. “I never put any misinformation up. I put up all the things that we now know are true and it was called misinformation.”
Fauci’s own notes from January 2020 said the Hunan Seafood Market was not where the outbreak began.
“Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” Fauci wrote on Jan. 26, after recording that the first infection came in December and was not connected to the market.
The origins debate continued days later on a Feb. 1 call with 12 scientists. That call eventually led to “Proximal Origins,” a scientific paper that strongly endorsed animal spillover as the source of COVID rather than a lab leak.
Fauci noted on the call that only two of the 12 scientists thought animal spillover was likely. The rest “felt deliberate insertion was possible.”
Kennedy blamed Fauci for Americans’ distrust of public health, saying people “shouldn’t” trust leaders who “lied to” them.
He also accused legacy media outlets of helping shut down dissent and protect Fauci.
“The press was part of this collaboration,” Kennedy said. “It was corrupt, and it did tremendous damage to the media in this country and to Americans’ faith in that very important democratic institution. It also did incalculable damage to public health.”
Fauci, 85, became known as “America’s doctor” during the 2020 COVID shutdowns as much of the public looked to him for guidance.
Kennedy now points to Fauci’s leadership when discussing the U.S. mortality rate, which he placed at 3,000 deaths per one million people.
“Because of Dr. Fauci’s leadership and other reasons, we had the highest mortality rate from COVID of any country in the world,” Kennedy told Fox News. “We literally did worse than any nation in the world.”
The next fight moves to Congress, where Fauci faces testimony Wednesday about the diary entries and his handling of the pandemic.
Kennedy said Paul will likely press Fauci on statements Kennedy believes were false and warned that new testimony could carry legal consequences.
“There are many things that [Fauci] said that we know are lies, and Rand Paul presumably is going to ask him about those things, and if he lies again, then he could be subject to perjury prosecution,” Kennedy said.
Later diary entries showed Fauci dismissing the lab-leak theory, writing that the FBI had no idea what it was talking about and growing furious with senators, including Paul, who were pushing him to investigate the hypothesis.
Fauci is should be in prison.