Investigative reporter Matt Taibbi has the story:

Mother Jones on Dr. Anthony Fauci: “The diary entries contain plenty of cringeworthy moments—Fauci congratulating himself on how famous he had become, for example, and basking in the attention of female celebrities like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. What they don’t contain—much to the dismay of Paul and Fauci’s other critics—is any kind of smoking gun proving that the public health leader deliberately misled the American people..” [italics added]

Taibbi responds, “I wonder what Mother Jones would consider a smoking gun:”

This is Fauci in writing explaining that 9 of 12 scientists at a key meeting he attended at the beginning of the pandemic felt that “deliberate insertion” of a key mutation was possible, in part because a prominent Chinese scientist known to all had been working on that exact sequencing problem just miles from where the first cases were reported. To repeat the smoking gun line: “Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain-of-function] to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor.”

For Fauci to subsequently say in public that the notion of laboratory release was without “scientific basis” was clearly deceptive.

“The Fauci Legend Will Not Die!” July 30, 2026

Similarly, NPR finds it necessary to continue to cast doubt on the lab leak hypothesis (July 29, 2026). Taibbi responds, “Lab leak was never a ‘baseless conspiracy theory,’ and it was always irresponsible (worse than irresponsible?) to describe it as such before the pandemic origins had been definitively traced.”

But much was, and is, at stake for these obsolescent media

They needed — and still need — to believe that The Science was reliable and that they were — and are — on the side of The Science.

At The Free Press, Nellie Bowles captures their mood back then:

There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci. He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events) …

In his diaries, Anthony Fauci clearly thought a lab leak was possible or even probable. Even as the whole elite intelligentsia made belief in wet-market origin a litmus test for being a good person for God knows what reason.

“TGIF: I Am the Most Famous and Talked-About Person in the Country,” July 31, 2026

Thus the revelations from Fauci’s papers are just something that needs explaining away. That is pretty much what they will continue to try to do.

Note: Taibbi has unlocked his stories on the Fauci “diary” uproar. He’s a good example of taking Elon Musk’s advice: In the age of the internet, don’t hate the media, become the media.