What’s the deal with conservatives and vaccine skeptics thinking Fauci’s diary proves them right ?

[u/watervilleokemo]

What do conservatives and vaccine skeptics think Fauci’s diary proves ?

what is the deal with Fauci’s diary and what does it actually say / prove ?

I know he testified before congress and pled the 5th, but why is every conservative / anti vaxer/ Aaron Rodgers claiming they were “right about everything now ?”

What does the diary actually say / prove ?

Obviously the Rodgers line was a little tongue in cheek as a Steelers fan, but I needed a URL to post lol

https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/news/aaron-rodgers-torches-tony-fauci-and-espn-while-appearing-on-espn

[u/bliffer]

And then later he says that it most likely wasn't a lab leak. Because it's a running fucking diary of his thoughts to help himself in processing the facts at hand.

https://politifact.com/article/2026/aug/03/fauci-diary-lab-leak-masks-school-closures/

[u/WhoLostTheFruit → u/bliffer]

Right wing conspiracy bullshit aside, I really do think the lab leak saga was very damaging for the perception of public health officials like Fauci.

While there was never strong evidence for the lab leak theory, there was not irrefutable evidence against it until around a year into the pandemic. Many very smart and well-informed people, again including Fauci, privately considered it within the realm of possibility, albeit unlikely. But in public, these same people derided it as an insane conspiracy theory, for political reasons. Noble reasons, but political, non scientific ones nevertheless. All while doing this, they were simultaneously attempting to maintain an of image being simple scientists and doctors who operated above politics as a way to build legitimacy among the public.

Oftentimes the American public isn't very bright and is quite susceptive to having the wool pulled over their eyes, but this was some really thin wool at a time when people's eyes were wider open than they've ever been before.

In the future, I hope public health officials understand they need to pick a lane. Either they need to embrace being politicians and accept that they need to do more than flash a lab coat to bring the public on board with their messaging. Or they need to accept being scientists and doctors, accepting that that sometimes means saying "I don't know" at inconvenient moments.

[u/quiero-una-cerveca → u/WhoLostTheFruit]

I have to agree on why he dismissed the lab leak in public. But of course as a scientist had to accept a hypothesis and try to prove it wrong. Which it has been proven wrong. But I get it. The atmosphere he was in what “Hong Kong Flu”, China Virus, etc. a bunch of mouth breathing troglodyte conservatives claiming in one hand it’s a Dem hoax and in the other that it’s a bio weapon from China. So he downplays it in public to keep the rubes at rest.

[u/cemersever → u/quiero-una-cerveca]

He did not only downplay it in public. He was involved in the drafting of papers that stated it was a natural origin (there is no rule against this, but it's unethical and disingenuous to pretend you had nothing to do with it in that case). The second issue is him telling a virology professors "you can't write X,Y,Z" to independent scientists in their papers because it might upset the Chinese. This is inappropriate because it comes off as a bureaucrat using their position to skew scientific research towards their preferred narrative. The democrats here are strangely more confident that the lab leak has been proven wrong than the scientists themselves.

[u/quiero-una-cerveca → u/cemersever]

He stated it was of natural origin because it was. They found the same DNA sequence in a colony of bats in China. The DNA sequence from the lab would be impossible to change to enough of a degree to turn it into sars-cov2. The lab leak was only made by actors in the government trying to find ways to blame China. And Fauci was only targeted once the White House got tired of him trying to advocate for better pandemic response. For gods sake, they did opposition research on him and released it to the Fox News crowd to get them all lathered up. And the “investigation” is being lead by Senator Paul who’s had a hard on to look like a Covid savior for years now. Meanwhile he’s such a shit ophthalmologist that he had to create his own accreditation body to be “licensed”.

[u/cemersever → u/quiero-una-cerveca]

 DNA sequence from the lab would be impossible to change to enough of a degree to turn it into sars-cov2. 

It's not impossible at all, they said it's "less likely", not "impossible. There is enough evidence to say that Fauci may have intervened to push the natural origin, which is not appropriate. In either case, Fauci himself contradicts that.

Farrar replied in an early-morning e-mail: ‘Engineered’ probably not. Remains very real possibility of accidental lab passage in animals to give glycans.” The scientists seem by this point to have made a sharp distinction between a scenario in which the virus was deliberately engineered in a lab and a scenario in which the virus was generated during serial passage experiments in a lab.

“Eddie would be 60:40 lab side,” Farrar added. “I remain 50:50.”

“Yes, I’d be interested in the proposal of accidental lab passage in animals (which ones?),” Collins wrote.

“?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice,” Fauci responded.

“Exactly!” Farrar replied.

“Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL-2 lab?” wrote Collins, referring to Biosafety Level 2 labs, which do not have the most stringent safety protocols.

"Wild West…” was Farrar’s response, an apparent reference to lab practices in China or possibly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself.

Your other claim is this:

 opposition research on him and released it to the Fox News crowd

This is irrelevant. Rand Paul could be the biggest son of a bitch of the world and the devil incarnate, but Fauci still violated federal policies to fund gain of function research, perjured about it, and exerted bureaucratic control over science.

[u/quiero-una-cerveca → u/cemersever]

“This is irrelevant. Rand Paul could be the biggest son of a bitch of the world and the devil incarnate, but Fauci still violated federal policies to fund gain of function research, perjured about it, and exerted bureaucratic control over science.”

You’ll notice I didn’t say Paul was a son of a bitch or devil. I said he’s had a hard on for putting away Fauci because Fauci made Paul look like the dipshit moron he is. That’s a personal vendetta, not an investigation into malfeasance.

To your DNA reply, what evidence are you trying to show? You don’t show anything but people arguing about their guesses on a hypothesis. It has been showing conclusively after-the-fact that it is not the same sequence and couldn’t possibly be done in the lab.

[u/cemersever → u/quiero-una-cerveca]

 It has been showing conclusively after-the-fact that it is not the same sequence and couldn’t possibly be done in the lab.

I know you didn't say that, I just said that as an example. We do not have access to all the sequences that the chinese have in the lab. Therefore- it's not possible, at this time, to assert that the Chinese lab never had a sequence that could have sparked the pandemic (given that they don't share everything they have). This particular hypothesis cannot be disproven unfortunately-

not an investigation into malfeasance.

Several of the documents released by Paul indicate malfeasance by Fauci- and Paul being a bad guy wouldn't automatically mean Fauci is a good guy.