Fauci privately estimated COVID-19 death rate far lower than he gave Congress, diary shows

( Just the News )

Dr. Anthony Fauci privately believed that the death rate of the COVID-19 was much lower than he told Congress just one month later, according to a record kept by the health official from February 2020.

The diary entry was made public by Sen. Rand Paul, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, prior to Dr. Fauci’s testimony earlier this week. During his appearance, Fauci refused to answer any substantive questions and cited the 5th Amendment more than 110 times.

During his time as the leading government health official during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci kept a meticulous record of his meetings, phone calls, and other day-to-day activities.

Fauci has faced scrutiny from Republicans for years for his role in the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force that included recommendations for school closures and social distancing.

On March 11, 2020, as the coronavirus spread beyond China to Europe and the United States, Fauci told the House Oversight Committee that he estimated COVID-19’s fatality at 3% and told lawmakers it was much more deadly than the seasonal flu.

The “case fatality rate” was “more like 0.2-0.3%”, Fauci's personal notes reveal

"The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data, including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and three," Fauci told the committee at the time. 

"I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu," Fauci continued. "I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand."

But, in a diary entry from just weeks before his testimony on Capitol Hill, Fauci memorialized a phone call with former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden in which both agreed the real “case fatality rate” was “more like 0.2-0.3%.”

“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 in the February 8 diary entry.

You can read Fauci’s notes below:

 2026.07.24_Tonys-Diary-Package.pdf

"Stirring up fear and anxiety"

Dr. Harvey Risch, Chairman of the Trump administration’s Cancer Panel at the Department of Health and Human Services, told Just the News that Fauci’s behavior is an example of the “gigantic hubris and toxic paternalism” in the public health industry.

“The fact that he knew this and couldn't say the truth in public means he had other interests to pursue,” Risch said on the Just the News, No Noise TV show.

“And, I think the worst one of all the ones […] was his estimate of the fatality rate of COVID that he was saying publicly it was one to 2%, stirring up fear and anxiety, while privately he was writing that it was a 10th of a percent, which is like a bad flu and would not have generated the same anxiety in the general public had he spoken the truth,” Risch added.

The more than 1,141 pages of records released by the Senate committee earlier this week provide the most detailed glimpse into Dr. Fauci’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s response to it.

The pages show, for example, how Fauci appeared to work to squash the lab leak theory, even though he, nor the vast majority of the scientists he consulted, accepted the Chinese "wet market" theory of COVID-19 origin in early 2020.

Fauci's alleged Feb. 1, 2020 personal notes recount the phone call that eventually produced the Proximal Origin paper, which concluded natural origin was the only credible explanation for COVID's emergence, Just the News previously reported. 

Only two of a dozen scientists on the call were "sure that this could occur naturally, and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this," Fauci said, referring to the possibility that the coronavirus’ unusual ability to easily infect humans was engineered.

"This vaccine never prevented infection" former CDC Director says

Additionally, the records show that Fauci was enjoying all the press attention he received when the COVID pandemic was spreading in March 2020. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the Trump administration, also remarked on how the press sided with him over President Donald Trump, Just the News reported earlier this week. 

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, who served during the COVID-19 pandemic, told Just the News that the diary pages substantiated allegations that the federal government had misled the public on its response to COVID-19.

"This vaccine never prevented infection, so when people said 'vaccinate your children so they don't infect grandma,' that was just a false statement. So very unfortunate," Redfield told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

"The American public was definitely misled. [Fauci] definitely had an intentional role, unfortunately, in misleading the American public around the origin of the virus, for sure, around the efficacy of the vaccines, and it's really sad,” he added.