Rand Paul Just Opened His Files to the Public. What’s in Them Should Worry Fauci

The Reading Room is live, and the documents keep getting worse for him.

Rand Paul didn’t wait for the July 29 hearing to start releasing what his committee has found. He built an entire public archive for it.

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Paul launched what he’s calling The Reading Room, a public-facing repository at paul.senate.gov/readingroom containing records from his committee’s ongoing investigation into COVID’s origins and federally funded gain-of-function research. It’s being updated on a rolling basis, meaning new documents keep landing as the investigation continues, not a one-time data dump designed to fade from the news cycle after a single day.

The launch alone came with a bombshell. Documents show that Customs and Border Protection built a formal targeting action to question EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak when he returned from the WHO’s own COVID origins mission, before the FBI stepped in and told agents to stand down. Someone wanted Daszak questioned. Someone else, with the authority to override that decision, made sure it never happened.

Why would federal agents be told to back off questioning the man at the center of America’s gain-of-function funding to Wuhan?

The Diary Entry That Undercuts Years of Public Reassurance

The most recent addition to the Reading Room, posted just days ago, may be the most damaging yet. According to the documents, Fauci’s own personal diary reveals that as early as January 31, 2020, he was told by top virologists that COVID’s furin cleavage site raised real doubts about a natural origin, with roughly half the scientists on that initial call believing the virus looked “constructed.”

That’s a private admission from the very first weeks of the pandemic. Fauci knew, in real time, that credible scientists were raising serious doubts about a natural origin. He spent the following years publicly and confidently dismissing the lab leak theory anyway, telling the American people the science was settled when his own diary shows it wasn’t, at least not in his own mind.

The documents also detail Fauci’s private frustration and defensiveness over gain-of-function funding questions tied to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as he told Congress under oath that no such research had occurred.

This Isn’t a New Fight, and Paul Isn’t Backing Down From It

Paul’s clash with Fauci over the actual definition of gain-of-function research goes back years, and it’s central to why so many people distrust anything Fauci has said on the subject since. During a heated 2021 hearing, Paul accused NIH of quietly changing the definition on its own website specifically to protect Fauci’s prior denials, telling him bluntly that the agency had altered the wording to “cover your ass, basically.”

Fauci’s own defense at the time only reinforced Paul’s suspicion. He called gain-of-function “a nebulous term,” claiming officials were simply trying to develop “a more precise definition” right around the same time the NIH quietly scrubbed the term from its website and replaced it with vaguer language like ePPP and P3CO.

Paul later laid out exactly how absurd that redefinition actually was. Under the altered standard, he explained, combining an unknown bat virus with a pathogen as lethal as MERS wouldn’t even count as gain-of-function research, because researchers supposedly can’t know in advance whether the result will actually be enhanced. Paul called that logic exactly what it is. “That’s crazy,” he wrote, arguing the NIH was defining gain-of-function out of existence rather than confronting what it had actually funded.

To be fair to the other side of this fight, Fauci has never accepted that characterization. He’s called Paul’s line of questioning “egregiously incorrect” and insisted the definition NIH used had been developed over more than two years before formal adoption by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s Fauci’s defense, on the record, and it hasn’t changed much in the years since.

What happens July 29 will be the first time Fauci has to answer for all of it, under subpoena, with the Reading Room’s documents sitting in the public record for anyone to check his answers against.

Get 29% off forever to symbolize the hard work Rand Paul has put in on this issue for years.

Let's hope the DOJ finally recognizes that Fauci's pardon is nonsense and finally prosecutes.