Anthony Fauci's diaries dismiss Sharri Markson's Covid-19 book as 'nonsense'
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former chief medical adviser to the US, described News Corp journalist Sharri Markson's book supporting the lab leak theory as 'a bunch of nonsense' in his newly released diaries. Fauci was subpoenaed to a Senate hearing where he refused to answer questions, accusing Senator Rand Paul of an 'unhinged' campaign.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as the US's chief medical adviser at the start of the pandemic, has sharply criticized News Corp investigative journalist Sharri Markson's book backing the lab leak theory of Covid-19's origins, calling it a 'bunch of nonsense' in his newly published diaries.
This week, the 85-year-old Fauci was subpoenaed by Republican Senator Rand Paul to appear at a Senate hearing on Covid-19 and his handling of the pandemic. The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who retired in 2022, refused to answer questions, accusing Paul of an 'unhinged' campaign pushing for his imprisonment.
Ahead of the hearing, Paul released 1,141 pages of Fauci's pandemic-era diary entries. In those entries, Fauci criticized reporting in The Australian newspaper and a book by Markson claiming that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was engaged in perilous experiments with bat coronaviruses.
On May 7, 2021, Markson reported in The Australian that Chinese military scientists had discussed weaponizing Sars coronaviruses five years before the pandemic and predicted a third world war would be fought with biological weapons. Fauci wrote in his diary that the article 'does not make any sense', questioning why someone would create an agent that could infect their own population.
Guardian Australia later found that the 'chilling' document cited in the article came from a discredited 2015 book containing conspiracy theories about biological warfare. China analysts criticized Markson's story as misleading and alarmist.
Fauci also targeted Markson's book 'What Really Happened in Wuhan', writing that 'the same old crap is going on with the far right continuing to attack me'. He noted that Markson quoted Richard Ebright, who called Fauci a liar about gain-of-function research. 'What a bunch of nonsense!' Fauci wrote.
Markson defended herself, stating that 'the majority of the intelligence community now concludes that Covid-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory' and that she 'led the way internationally exposing the role of Anthony Fauci's agency funding projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.
The origins of the Covid-19 pandemic remain a subject of intense debate between the natural-origins hypothesis and lab leak theories.
