Fauci Recorded COVID's Relatively Low Fatality Rate in His Diary, But Gave Congress a Figure That Was Obscenely Higher
Numbers don’t lie — but that doesn’t mean health officials don’t lie about numbers.
That’s one of the biggest lessons from the continuing revelations about the government response to the coronavirus pandemic and its leader, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.
Fauci famously pleaded the Fifth last week during an embarrassing appearance before the Senate, but his own words convict him.
As the news site Just the News highlighted Sunday, Fauci himself estimated in a diary entry that the mortality rate of the COVID-19 virus was about “0.2-0.3%.”
The notation came as he described a conversation with Tom Frieden, who was then the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
“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 Feb. 8, 2020, diary entry.
Yet only a few weeks later, in sworn testimony on Capitol Hill, he said the mortality rate — the rate at which a COVID-19 infection would kill its victim — was 1 percent — three to five times higher than he apparently actually believed.
Fauci’s diary says he privately put COVID’s fatality rate at 0.2-0.3%. Under oath weeks later, he told Congress it was 10x the flu. The timeline:
Feb 8, 2020 (private diary): case fatality rate “more like 0.2-0.3%.”
March 10 (Hannity): “The mortality for this is about 2-2.5%.… pic.twitter.com/rMBAAkfUBG
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) July 27, 2026
By comparison, the seasonal flu generally has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent, Fauci told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in March 2020, minutes show.
“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around 1 percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” Fauci told lawmakers. “I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand.”
Yeah, well, most people are now getting their arms around something else entirely — that the man who arrogantly represented the face of “Science” for so long was telling the representatives of the American people one thing while saying something else completely in private (or as “private” as a bureaucrat can be when he’s recording his innermost thoughts on government computers).
Unfortunately, it’s not completely surprising that Fauci would deliberately misrepresent his thoughts.
In a New York Times interview back in December 2020, he admitted changing his public statements about “herd immunity” — the level of resistance to the coronavirus it would be necessary to achieve before the pandemic would fade — based on the public’s acceptance of vaccination.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told the nation’s alleged “Newspaper of Record.”
“Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
That report wasn’t judgmental about Fauci’s confession — if anything, it was portrayed in a positive, almost heroic, light. But it proved, using Fauci’s own words, that the good doctor was more than willing to lie to the American public to advance his agenda.
And after all this time, the question remains: What exactly was Fauci’s agenda? The answer seems clear.
He reveled in the power and influence the pandemic gave him, just as big-government Democrats reveled in their abuses of civil liberties. Had Fauci told lawmakers in March of 2020 that he considered the coronavirus pandemic to be maybe twice or three times as deadly as the seasonal flu, there’s a good chance that the madness the country endured over the ensuing years would have been greatly reduced.
Would heavy-handed statists still have tried to impose their lockdowns on schools, churches, and other American institutions? Almost certainly. Leftists love nothing more than an excuse to expand their power.
But would the American public have stood the trammeling of its traditional rights for what amounted to a severe flu season, rather than a supposedly apocalyptic viral scourge that was putting global civilization on the road to dystopia?
Fauci evidently did not feel compelled to tell the truth to lawmakers — or at least not the same “truth” he recorded in his diary. So he gave Congress what, by any measure, was an obscenely high estimate for the actual COVID-19 death rate.
And as a result, direct or indirect, countless Americans lost their loved ones and never got a chance to say goodbye. Millions of schoolchildren and young adults lost irreplaceable learning time in their early education — a loss that’s going to keep showing up in the country far into the future.
Countless adults lost jobs and wages in an economically devastating slowdown manufactured in Washington, D.C.
And one way or another, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his willful manipulations of the truth were behind it.
Numbers might not lie, but, judging by his own diary, Anthony Fauci clearly did.
And no matter how much he invokes the Fifth Amendment, or stonewalls the American people and their lawmakers, he’s going to be branded as guilty.
Because his own words have convicted him.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
