In 2015, researchers at Fort Detrick took four groups of monkeys, vaccinated them with four different Ebola vaccines, and then sprayed aerosolized lethal Ebola virus into their lungs. Nearly all of them died. The vaccinated animals showed greater inflammation, necrosis, and fibrin deposits in the lungs than the unvaccinated controls.
The man who funded the experiment didn't panic about the dead monkeys. He panicked about the paperwork.
Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, released documents Monday from what's been called the "Fauci Diaries" — internal emails and personal diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The documents reveal that NIAID funded the experiment at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases under a NIAID task order. Fauci's agency designed it. The Army executed it. And when the results showed vaccinated primates faring worse than unvaccinated ones, Fauci's first instinct wasn't to investigate the safety failure.
It was to bury the data.
"What idiots those guys at USAMRIID are," Fauci wrote in a diary entry dated March 7, 2016. The experiment "should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place." Two days later, on March 9, he fired off emails faulting "foolish DOD people" for sending the results to the FDA — not because the data was wrong, but because now someone outside his orbit had seen it.
His concern wasn't that a lethal pathogen had been aerosolized in a U.S. Army lab. His concern wasn't that four groups of vaccinated primates developed lung necrosis and died. His concern was that the FDA now had documentation showing vaccines made the disease worse — and that data could erode public confidence in vaccination programs. The science wasn't the problem. The audience was.
"If someone does not tell me the truth and I find out they did not, then they are gone," Fauci wrote in a follow-up email. The threat wasn't aimed at the researchers who aerosolized Ebola. It was aimed at whoever let the results leak.
Ebola kills at a rate roughly 50 times higher than COVID-19. Those infected bleed out of every orifice as their organs fail one by one. NIAID funded an experiment that engineered the virus into an aerosol capable of reaching deep lung tissue, tested vaccines against it, watched the vaccines fail catastrophically, and the agency director's documented response was that the whole thing should have been classified. Not stopped. Classified.
"These records show NIAID was funding risky research with the Defense Department," Senator Paul said. "Americans deserve to know what kind of risky research their taxpayer dollars are funding." Paul has introduced the Risky Research Review Act, which would require an independent board to review dangerous pathogen experiments before they're approved — the kind of oversight that didn't exist when NIAID was writing task orders for aerosolized Ebola at Fort Detrick.
This is the same Anthony Fauci who spent 2020 and 2021 assuring the American public that his agency had never funded gain-of-function research that could endanger human health. The same official who dismissed lab-leak questions as conspiracy theories. The same bureaucrat who told Congress under oath that NIAID's research portfolio was safe, transparent, and subject to rigorous oversight. The diary entries from 2016 show a man whose first reflex when confronted with dangerous results from his own funded research was to demand classification and threaten anyone who talked.
The experiments happened under the Obama administration. The cover-up instinct predates COVID by half a decade. The pattern was already set: fund the research, control the results, punish the leaks.
Fauci called the Army researchers idiots. Not for aerosolizing Ebola. For getting caught.
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