Diary entries from February 2020 put the case fatality rate at 0.2-0.3%, but he later told lawmakers it was higher
By Catholics for Catholics
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the seminal figure of the COVID pandemic era, allegedly wrote in a private diary that he calculated the death rate from the illness as much lower than what he told Congress under oath weeks earlier.
Fauci, 85, has come under severe scrutiny for years regarding his tactics in spearheading the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, and his supposed connections to the Chinese lab where the virus originated, according to a story by Fox News. He is scheduled to return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to talk about his newly revealed personal records.
“The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and three,” Fauci said in testimony before the House Oversight Committee on March 11, 2020, according to a transcript of the hearing.
At the beginning of the pandemic reaching the U.S., Fauci was asked during the hearing by Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, to compare the mortality from COVID-19 to the mortality of the seasonal flu.
“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” Fauci said. “I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand.”
But in private, on Feb. 8, 2020, about a month before that congressional testimony, Fauci said that he believed the virus’s mortality rate was much lower than what he later told lawmakers.
“[Former CDC Director] Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak,” Fauci wrote. “He and I are on the same page in thinking that [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%.”
At that time, Fauci had counted 34,687 cases of the virus and 724 fatalities, according to his diary, which equals just over 2%.
Fauci was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the pandemic, and first became the face of combatting COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic during President Donald Trump’s first term, and remained in the role under President Joe Biden until retiring in 2022.
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