When I spoke with Dr Shankara Chetty about the release of Anthony Fauci’s pandemic diary, I expected the familiar questions: where SARS-CoV-2 came from, what was known about gain-of-function research, and why the laboratory-origin hypothesis was pushed so quickly outside respectable debate.
Dr Chetty went further.
He told me the diary validated his early instinct that the virus was probably manipulated and had entered the population through a laboratory-related event. But his central argument was not about where the virus came from. He wanted to talk about intention.
That is where the conversation became deliberately uncomfortable.
Most people are prepared to discuss error. They can accept that scientists were uncertain, institutions became defensive, policies were rushed, and officials sometimes spoke with more confidence than the evidence justified.
Dr Chetty does not think error explains the pattern. He believes the research and the response formed part of an agenda.
I know many readers will reject that immediately. But dismissing him without first understanding what he claims would repeat one of the central failures of the pandemic.
What the Diary Actually Changes
I need to be precise about what the released diary establishes.
At the end of January 2020, leading scientists were privately discussing features of the virus—including the furin cleavage site—that they found difficult to reconcile with the known evolutionary record. A laboratory-related origin and deliberate insertion were not being treated as absurd. They were serious enough to bring some of the world’s most influential virologists and public-health officials onto urgent calls.
There was disagreement. Some participants favoured a natural explanation. The diary records no settled conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered, and it certainly does not prove that a pandemic was deliberately released.
Yet within weeks, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 stated that the virus was not a laboratory construct or purposefully manipulated. The public was rarely shown the intensity of the uncertainty that preceded that conclusion.
Even now the position is not closed. The World Health Organization’s 2025 assessment judged zoonotic spillover to be better supported by the available evidence, while also stating that missing laboratory records meant a laboratory-related incident could neither be confirmed nor eliminated.
It would therefore be dishonest for me to say Dr Chetty has been proved right about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. It would be equally dishonest to pretend his early suspicion was baseless. At minimum, he was right that gain-of-function research and a possible laboratory event deserved serious investigation rather than censorship or ridicule.
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Dr Chetty’s Claim About Intention
Dr Chetty’s interpretation begins with the research itself.
He asks why scientists would place a furin cleavage site into a SARS-related coronavirus, or otherwise test changes capable of increasing entry, transmissibility or pathogenicity. The conventional answer is preparedness: by anticipating what a dangerous virus might become, researchers hope to develop surveillance tools, treatments and vaccines before nature produces it.
Dr Chetty does not accept that justification. In his view, work that makes a potential pandemic pathogen more dangerous creates a risk to humanity that no speculative future benefit can balance. He described the purpose as “nefarious”.
He then connected that research to the policy sequence that followed. He described the response as a journey:
- fear was amplified,
- restrictions normalised,
- vaccination presented as the indispensable solution,
- and the target population expanded steadily from vulnerable adults to younger adults, pregnant women and children.
His most provocative claim was that the objective was never merely to control COVID. It was to vaccinate as much of the world as possible, with as many doses as could be justified.
The diary’s booster entries strengthened that impression for him. Fauci recorded internal disagreement over whether the data justified boosting, yet also wrote that boosters “can help” and “certainly cannot hurt”. Later entries acknowledged unresolved myocarditis concerns in younger people and tension between advisers over how broadly to extend recommendations.
To Dr Chetty, that did not look like policy following evidence. It looked like a fixed destination, with changing scientific explanations used to keep the programme moving towards it.
He went further, linking the pattern to longstanding ideas about population control, eugenics and the manipulation of nature. I include that because it was his opinion, and because sanitising it would misrepresent our conversation. But I must state the boundary plainly: Fauci’s diary does not prove that wider claim.
“Intention” Is Not One Question
I think this debate becomes confused because several different questions are collapsed into one.
What was the intention behind enhancing the properties of dangerous viruses? What was the intention behind funding and supervising that research? If a laboratory-related event occurred, was the release accidental or deliberate? Why did institutions later manage the origins debate so aggressively? And why were vaccine recommendations advanced with a confidence that sometimes exceeded the evidence recorded privately?
Evidence relevant to one question does not automatically answer the others.
A scientist may have intended to improve preparedness. A funding body may have intended to preserve a strategically important research programme. Officials may have intended to protect public confidence. Institutions may then have protected their reputations once they saw that their own decisions could be implicated.
That combination could produce secrecy, censorship and coercive policy without any single coordinated plan.
Dr Chetty’s interpretation is that the consistency of the direction matters more than the changing explanations. He sees coordination where others see institutional convergence, self-protection or panic.
I cannot settle that question from the diary. But I no longer think it acceptable to rule the question out before investigating it.
Being Right Early Does Not Make Someone Infallible
One point Dr Chetty made deserves more attention than it has received: there were no true COVID experts at the beginning. The disease was new to everyone.
Credentials established training and authority. They did not confer understanding of a virus that had only just entered the recognised human population. That expertise had to be earned in real time—through observation, prediction and correction. Dr Chetty was treating patients and building a model from what he saw. Others held prestigious positions but were often several steps removed from bedside disease.
His early recognition that the official origin narrative was too certain gives his present opinion the right to be heard. It does not make every later conclusion correct.
Being right early earns someone a hearing. It does not grant immunity from evidence.
That principle must apply equally to Dr Chetty, Anthony Fauci, institutional scientists and those of us who challenged the dominant narrative.
What Could this Mean?
I do not think the public should be forced to choose between believing that every pandemic decision was an innocent mistake and accepting that every event belonged to one vast plan.
There are other possibilities: dangerous research pursued under an inflated claim of public benefit, an accidental release, institutional concealment, the protection of funding relationships, political pressure, and policies driven by predetermined objectives.
The way to distinguish them is not another slogan. It is access to the research records, experimental protocols, funding decisions, biosafety reports, communications and unedited scientific disagreements.
Dr Chetty ended our discussion by arguing that gain-of-function and related research may pose one of the greatest threats humanity has created. I would not stop biotechnology as a whole; its medical value is too great. But research capable of creating or enhancing pandemic-level hazards cannot continue behind narrow technical definitions and institutional assurances.
The diary has not proved Dr Chetty’s explanation of intention. It has done something more important: it has shown that those who raised the gain-of-function question early were not irrational for doing so.
Now that their first question has returned to legitimate debate, I believe we have to hear the second:
If scientists deliberately enhanced the dangerous properties of coronaviruses, who decided that the potential benefit justified the risk—and what, precisely, were they trying to achieve?
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