Dr Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former chief medical adviser who became a household name by telling us to wash our hands and wear masks, has used his newly released diaries to dismiss a book by News Corp journalist Sharri Markson as a 'bunch of nonsense.' The book, which pushes the lab leak theory of Covid-19's origins, apparently failed to impress the man who spent decades running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

This week, Fauci was subpoenaed by Republican Senator Rand Paul to appear at a Senate hearing on Covid-19 - a continuation of Paul's years-long campaign to prove the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab. Unsurprisingly, Fauci refused to answer questions, accusing Paul of an 'unhinged' campaign to have him imprisoned.

Ahead of the hearing, Paul released 1,141 pages of Fauci's pandemic-era diary entries, in which the physician took aim at Markson's reporting in The Australian and her book 'What Really Happened in Wuhan.' The book claims a Wuhan facility was 'immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments,' which Fauci found about as credible as a tweet from a conspiracy theorist.

On 7 May 2021, Markson reported that Chinese military scientists 'discussed the weaponisation of Sars coronaviruses five years before the Covid-19 pandemic.' Fauci wrote in his diary that the article 'does not make any sense,' asking, 'Why would someone want to make an agent that could equally infect your own population?' A fair point, one might think.

Guardian Australia later found the 'chilling' document cited in the article was based on a discredited 2015 book full of biological warfare conspiracy theories, freely available on the internet. China analysts called the story misleading and alarmist, while Foreign Policy deputy editor James Palmer noted its links to right-wing conspiracy theories.

Markson's book argued there was 'no scientific consensus that Covid-19 has a natural origin' and that China conspired to cover up the truth. Fauci, never one to mince words, wrote: 'The same old crap is going on with the far right continuing to attack me.' He called the book 'a bunch of nonsense,' adding that the far right is trying to discredit him.

Markson fired back, claiming 'the majority of the intelligence community now concludes that Covid-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory' and that she 'led the way internationally exposing the role of Anthony Fauci's agency funding 65 projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.'

The origins of Covid-19 remain a hotly debated topic, with natural-origins hypotheses suggesting the virus jumped from an animal to a human, while lab leak theories argue it escaped from a Chinese lab. Science marches on, but apparently, so do political axes to grind.