Overview
- Sen. Rand Paul made public a new batch of internal Slack messages from authors of the 2020 Proximal Origin paper and more than 1,000 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary entries in late July 2026, releasing private notes that change the public record.
- The Slack excerpts show authors privately assigning nonzero odds to a laboratory origin — Kristian Andersen wrote an early 30 percent estimate and Edward Holmes offered 20 percent later revised to 10 percent — even after the paper publicly dismissed lab engineering.
- Fauci’s diary entries include a Jan. 26, 2020 note saying the Wuhan market appeared not to be the original source and a record of a January conference call in which multiple scientists privately considered deliberate insertion or a lab accident a plausible possibility.
- The messages also reveal discussions among scientists about managing records and communications, including advice to ‘stay off email’ and to curate materials for Freedom of Information requests, while Nature Medicine has not retracted the Proximal Origin paper.
- The releases are driving a Senate Homeland Security hearing with Fauci set to testify and could prompt renewed oversight of U.S. funding, gain-of-function research practices, and public-health communication, with partisan outlets stressing different aspects of the documents.