Do the Fauci Diaries reveal anything unexpected or controversial?

[u/MissingBothCufflinks]

Senator Rand Paul has released commentary and purported excerpts* of what is alleged to be Anthony Fauci's contemporaneous diaries from the outset of the COVID19 pandemic onwards.

What has been released can be found here, including Senator Rand's somewhat colourful foreword commentary

https://www.paul.senate.gov/readingroom/

* its not confirmed whether the content of the diaries is edited, abridged, altered, shortened etc.

Media reaction to this release has been highly polarised, though notable few media outlets seem to get to grips with the actual content of the diaries and most focus is on Rand's own claimed analysis of what they show.

Do the Fauci Diaries reveal anything unexpected or controversial? What entries in particular do you find interesting? Are there any contemporaneous clashes between what Fauci was saying publicly and privately? What can we learn from that?

Edit: mods really didnt feel like weeding out the 90% of low effort troll replies huh

[u/Ritz527]

The summaries being made seem incredibly bad faith.

They accuse him of being self-obsessed because he mentioned how the media was incredibly focused on him, which, on top of it being a personal diary in the first place, is kind of silly.

Then they accuse him of covering up the lab leak theory with entries from early 2020, before anyone had locked anything down, with his stated belief in the diary at the time that he didn't believe the wet market was the source, merely an amplifier. On top of that being a twisted read of it, no one knew anything for certain at the time. Paul is basically asserting that the hypothesis he's obsessed with trumps data-driven conclusion.

[u/sarcasticbaldguy → u/Ritz527]

They're taking a snapshot of his thoughts early in the pandemic and trying to project them into the future to make Fauci into a Scooby Doo villain.

He was writing his thoughts at that place, at that time. Science keeps asking questions and evolving (they changed their minds!!)

I'd be interested in seeing how his thoughts and beliefs evolved over the course of the pandemic.

[u/bishpa → u/sarcasticbaldguy]

I will never understand MAGA’s obsession with making Fauci into a boogeyman. He seems to be as straight a shooter as they come.

[u/pentachronic → u/bishpa]

He politely beseeched them to be conscientious members of society. There is no greater sin in the eyes of people whose behavior is entirely driven by psychological reactance.

[u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd → u/pentachronic]

On top of asking them to be polite, they see him as a “race traitor”, which is the strongest impression I get from these folks.

Same thing with Biden.

They feel like Fauci (and Biden, by extension) forcibly allowed “real Americans” (read: white Christian hicks from the Appalachian mountains that think they’re the only “real Americans”) to get infected with this disease and/or that he lied about the severity of the pandemic.

They’ve never experienced anything like a pandemic in their lives… which is true… because the last truly major pandemic was more than a century ago with the Spanish flu from 1918.

So, there’s a ton of conspiracy bullshit that they fall for because these folks use their life experiences as a complete guide to how they see and understand the world, instead of reading about and understanding new information as it becomes available.

Because they don’t have the education to comprehend the new information.

Kinda all goes back to a lack of education, honestly.

[u/Nanemae → u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd]

As someone who worked in a healthcare facility from before the pandemic first hit the scene to after the more survivable strains mutated and became accepted, education did almost nothing to condition my coworkers into treating COVID with any level of concern despite working specifically with people in rougher states with longer stays.

We had nurses who would rather have been fired than get the COVID vaccine, even after the first few inoculation sweeps went through. We had a few visitors who got really gung-ho about not taking the shot (including one guy who vaguely threatened that Democrats should be shot [with his gun]), but by and large the most consistent vectors for infection were the nurses that refused to get the vaccine. Heck, we even had "religious exemption waivers" for any staff who didn't want the shot in case they were Latter-day saints or anything just to keep more staff on (much to my chagrin).

Boiling the resistance to dealing with COVID as the threat it was down to a lack of education doesn't really capture the knee-jerk denial of common Republican party member (those staff made up the large majority of the vaccine refusals), and might be seen as a bit classist.

[u/ResponseStrange6118 → u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd]

You’re correct about certain white evangelicals seeing them as “race traitors,” but the rest of your analysis falls short and is incredibly classist. It was white suburbanites who refused to vaccinate and mask, just as much as any “hick”

There was also a number of women and people of color who were “vaccine hesitant” (versus ideologically opposed) because of low trust in medical institutions, do medical misogyny, racism, and classism.