Fauci Complains Questions About COVID Origins Were ‘Wasting’ Time

Dr. Anthony Fauci rejected questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and funding sent from the United States to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, saying that he was “wasting” time by addressing the concerns posed by members of Congress.

Fauci’s private thoughts were presented for public consumption when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) — who was responsible for asking many of the aforementioned questions — published a number of diary entries he’d uncovered while investigating the former White House medical adviser.

Paul shared a lengthy thread on X, complete with screenshots of some of the most relevant diary entries, and added some of his own notes ahead of Fauci’s scheduled testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

9/9 July 12, 2021. Fauci complains about “how many hours we are all wasting” answering letters he calls “fundamentally driven by conspiracy theories” — from senators he names, including me.
Asking who funded the research is not a conspiracy theory. It’s oversight. pic.twitter.com/ZgjIrsyAam

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 25, 2026

On July 7, 2021 — long after it was first posited in January of 2020 that a new coronavirus strain could have been leaked from the Wuhan lab, either intentionally or accidentally — Fauci wrote that he had actively encouraged members of the National Security Council to work with several “qualified”virologists to dig into the pandemic’s origins. Two of the four virologists he’d recommended to the NSC came out with a paper that same day arguing that the virus had occurred naturally.

On July 9, Fauci complained about “how many hours we are all wasting” taking questions about whether or not U.S. funding for the Wuhan lab had been used to conduct dangerous “gain-of-function” research that would have made the virus more deadly.

“It is important to point out how many hours we are all wasting in responding to the multiple letters from senators and congressmen fundamentally driven by conspiracy theories that the NIH has funded work at Wuhan institute of virology that led to SARS-CoV-2,” he wrote. “For example, over the weekend I was on multiple zoom calls with my staff fine-tuning the letters in response to the multiple questions.”

He referenced Paul as one of the senators asking questions, and then voiced surprise that he’d also received questions from Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) because “he generally is a friendly person to me.”