Anthony Fauci’s diary included the names and medical information of people he came into contact with as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including people with cancer, Ebola or HIV.
Sen. Rand Paul’s office published Fauci’s diary entries without redacting those sensitive details. The documents expose more than 20 individuals by name along with their medical histories, a NOTUS review found.
Paul published over 1,600 pages of Fauci’s diaries last week ahead of Fauci’s appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, after obtaining the documents from the Department of Health and Human Services. The initial document dump was unredacted. Days later, those files were removed and replaced with partial redactions to some, but not all, of the personal medical information.
The unredacted entries have raised legal questions around how the Health Department disclosed these documents to the Senate. Several of the individuals named in the documents said they were unaware their medical history had been made public and expressed concerns around their personal privacy.
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“What this administration does with information is selective, it is unconstitutional and truly disappointing,” Leslie Adelman, one of the individuals whose medical information was revealed in the documents, told NOTUS in a text message.
Adelman said she was “pretty offended that my name and public health information have been shared to the world.”
NOTUS is only publishing the names of the private individuals who have given direct approval to appear in this story. Fauci’s diary entries remain accessible with some redactions on Paul’s Senate office website. Paul, who has long called for Fauci to be jailed for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, has suggested that the documents reveal that Fauci thought the COVID-19 virus emerged from a lab. The senator continues to promote the documents on social media.
HHS provided the documents to Paul in response to an oversight request, not a subpoena, an agency spokesperson, Grace Davis Jamison, said in a statement provided to NOTUS.
In an interview with Fox News, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said HHS provided the documents to Paul’s office after his team uncovered them on government servers.
The published records include names, diagnoses, symptoms and test results of individuals. Two of the people identified by name alongside their medical details were children, including the child of Trump administration staffer Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie Miller. Katie Miller previously told NOTUS that Paul’s office published the details of her child’s medical care without her knowledge or permission. They were subsequently redacted.
Some of the named individuals are public figures, including President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. Others appear to be private individuals whose medical history has never been publicly released before. One Ebola patient’s medical saga is recounted in detail across over 30 pages.
Paul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
There is no indication that Fauci intended for the unredacted notes to become public. Some of the entries that included medical information were labeled by Fauci as “confidential.”
In his opening statement before the Senate committee, Fauci said that Paul’s release of his “unredacted personal diary” was intended to embarrass and intimidate him, and accused the senator of having an “unhinged obsession” with jailing him. Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during the hearing. Fauci did not respond to a request for comment.
A person close to Fauci said in a text message that Fauci “never intended for any of his personal diary entries to be made public. They were his own personal notes/reflections to himself.”
In a series of posts on X, Paul called the released documents a “personal account of building the federal biodefense complex” and wrote that they reveal the former health official’s “love for the newfound fame COVID brought him.”
The documents include Fauci’s recounting of patients he met in passing who seemingly have nothing to do with either biodefense or COVID. In an entry dated to Oct. 26, 2020, he wrote of visiting Adelman, a patient at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, at her request.
“Went to Clinical Center to visit a young woman (Leslie Adelman) who has Von Hipple-Lindau disease and had a hemangioblastoma in her cerebellum removed last week,” Fauci wrote. “Since she was in the hospital she asked her neurosurgeon Dr. Kareem Zaghloul if it were possible to meet me. I, of course, said yes and went to see her. Quite a time. Nurses and physicians all wanted pictures with me. Leslie was delighted. Made my day.”
Adelman confirmed Fauci’s account of their meeting. “He made my day even more,” she told NOTUS.
She also expressed frustration at what she viewed as the federal government’s differing standards for releasing personal information.
“If I was a victimizer in the Epstein files, my name would have been redacted,” Adelman said. “Instead, I am an innocent and productive member of society, who has donated her time and body to NIH for research that will benefit millions of people — yet MY name and information is blasted to the national news.”
The released documents also include extensive detail on American medical providers who contracted Ebola during the 2014-2016 outbreak, and whose care Fauci was closely involved with. Craig Spencer, an emergency room physician who contracted Ebola and whose medical information was included in the released documents, called it “stupid and irresponsible” that they were published.
“My information out there doesn’t do anything or highlight anything,” Spencer said.
Spencer’s name and information was redacted in the updated versions of the released documents. Adelman’s medical information was not. Of two HIV-positive individuals that Fauci recounted meeting in the early 2000s, one name was redacted, but not the other.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has released files without redacting personal information. Last year, it released thousands of pages related — some only barely — to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those pages also contained the personal information, including Social Security numbers, of hundreds of congressional staff members, intelligence researchers and an ambassador.
The White House later acknowledged that it only began looking through the JFK files for personal information after they were already published. It directed the Social Security Administration to issue new numbers to the people who were affected, as well as offer them free credit monitoring.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department withdrew several thousand documents it published related to Jeffrey Epstein after it was found that they contained unredacted information and media pertaining to Epstein’s victims, including nude photos, names and email addresses. A federal judge is also currently reviewing whether the Justice Department over-redacted documents tied to Epstein it released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The fact that the Fauci documents were released by HHS voluntarily and not under a subpoena may mean the individuals named in them have a constitutional claim against the agency, one privacy expert said — though another said it would be exceedingly difficult.
“The Fifth Amendment and the 14th Amendment have been read by a number of federal circuit courts to provide a right of informational privacy, which protects against situations like this,” said John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The disclosure of sensitive personal information, health information, is often implicated in claims like this without a corresponding legitimate basis for disclosure.”
He added, “It’s hard to imagine that this kind of bulk disclosure of sensitive health information serves any sort of legitimate, compelling government interest.”
It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for any of the impacted individuals to assert a constitutional claim in this circumstance due to the “distorted path” the documents took to publication, said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University.
“This doesn’t fit squarely into any of the privacy laws,” Hoffman said. “It’s just sort of bizarre behavior.”
When contacted by NOTUS, individuals whose medical information was published in the documents said they were frustrated both by the release of their information and by the continued criticism of Fauci.
“All I will say is this man does not deserve any of this SHIT that he and his family are going through,” Carla Heeke Dean, a former patient of Fauci’s whose medical information was included in the documents, said in an email.
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