[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Six years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are still uncovering what was really happening behind closed doors.

“What [Dr. Anthony Fauci] says many times privately in his diary is so at odds with both his public behavior and public statements,” says Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser and author of the new book “Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison.”

What do Fauci’s private notes reveal about the suppression of the lab leak theory? And why did Fauci initially support exploring hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 and later change his mind?

Fauci did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Peter Navarro, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Peter Navarro:

My pleasure to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

When was it that you first realized there was this record, now known as the Fauci Diaries? And how did you come to gain access to it?

Mr. Navarro:

Well, that’s a story in and of itself. Bobby Kennedy Jr., as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, basically went hunting.Somehow he knew that Fauci had written this thing, and it took him eight months to find that diary, and it was released by Senator Rand Paul. And this book, Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison—and I mean that literally—is basically a tale of two diaries. It’s my diary from the pandemic years, including the first year. 

The first day I met Fauci in the iconic West Wing Situation Room, and all the meetings I had, vs. his diary, which is extraordinary in one particular sense. What he says many times privately in his diary is so at odds with both his public behavior and public statements that it’s mind-numbing. Inevitably, he would acknowledge issues correctly inside his private diary and then do just the opposite and wind up hurting and killing people. And therein lies the tale.

Mr. Jekielek:

Did you wait until Rand Paul actually released these things? Or did someone say, hey, you were at odds with this guy way back when, I remember? You need to take a look at this.

Mr. Navarro:

In my first White House memoir, In Trump Time, there’s a whole series of chapters that relate to my confrontations with Anthony Stephen Fauci. I was the only guy in the West Wing that would confront him on everything from initially the China travel ban to the lockdowns to the masks to the vaccines, the boosters, and all of that. Because I was in the White House, heavily involved in managing the pandemic. I went from the chief trade advisor and China hawk. 

As soon as the virus hit, to the quartermaster. I was the guy who was responsible for making sure you and others had the masks, gloves, and all the PPE [Personal Protective Equipment], the swabs for testing. I was part of the catalyst for Operation Warp Speed, which would eventually lead to the vaccine, and I would repeatedly meet Fauci. And what I didn’t know at the time was all the things he divulges in his diary, which are so extraordinary. 

For example, I went on television, the Maria Bartiromo Sunday show, which is the highest-rated show on Sundays. And I said flat out in April of 2020 that the virus came from the Wuhan lab. And there was a firestorm when I said that. I’m a senior member of the Trump White House. And it was like everybody else was saying it was from nature. What I didn’t know at the time was three months earlier, 12 experts had been on a conference call with Tony Fauci. And told him flat out, 10 out of 12 said, that thing’s from the Wuhan lab, meaning that it was human-engineered using gain-of-function research.

Now, knowing that, just that alone prompted me to write Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison, because what ensued from that point in time is the biggest cover-up in medical history. Because Tony Fauci knew as soon as those experts told him, as soon as they said that thing is from the lab, he knew he was responsible for that. He knew he was responsible because he had fought to have gain-of-function research reinstated. It had been banned by the Obama administration. 

He fought hard to get it reinstated. Money that he signed off on went to the Wuhan lab through this cutout called EcoHealth Alliance and this shadowy character named Peter Daszak. And it went right into the pockets of the infamous Bat Lady at the Wuhan lab, which is also not just a civilian research lab, but a military one.

And at that point in time, in January, Tony Fauci knew that he likely was responsible for whatever pandemic was heading our way, and then he covered it up. And part of the story of why Fauci must rot in prison is that cover-up. And part of the way we unravel that mystery is through a combination of his diary and mine. 

And so this is something that I think your audience in particular will be very, very interested in because this has CCP [Chinese Communist Party] written all over it. There’s something that I’ve been writing about for many years. You have read my book, Death by China. And the playbook for the CCP across technologies is basically to steal it, adapt it, and use it. They have a policy called IDAR, [Intelligent Data and Artificial Intelligence Regulation]. It’s to ingest the technology, by hook or crook, however they can get it. It’s often by pure intellectual property theft. 

Then they digest it, they figure out how it works and they get their people involved and kind of use it. And then they assimilate it into their economic and manufacturing base. And then the last one is the important one: re-innovate, which is to mean to take that technology and use it in ways which hadn’t otherwise been envisioned.

Now, how does that apply to Anthony Stephen Fauci? Basically, what Fauci did is the same thing manufacturers here in America often do. He offshored a technology to leverage a lax regulatory environment. The labs over there have lower standards than the labs here to leverage cheaper labor. And basically, what the Chinese Communist Party did in that military lab was re-innovate gain-of-function research so that they could take a bat virus, a harmless bat virus that the infamous Bat Lady of Wuhan would get from caves a thousand miles away, bring them back to that lab and turn them into bat viruses that were harmless to humans that could kill humans. And that’s the root of why Fauci should rot in prison.  

But the extraordinary thing about it, Jan, was he was able to hide that the whole time that he lorded over us and lorded over the pandemic. If I had known that he funded that research, Tony Fauci would never have existed as a bobblehead and as like the hero of Hollywood and elsewhere. The book is partly about that initial cover-up, and it was a cover-up. It’s a long story about the cover-up of how he arranged it. But then it’s also about a series of confrontations I had with him in the West Wing over just about everything. The China travel ban was when I first met him, and we debated that issue. 

But it was the lockdowns, the masks, the vaccines, the boosters. And it’s a story where I’m the prosecutor, you’re the jury; you’re going to render a verdict, and then at the end of the book, I show actually how a prosecution can and should happen. It'll be done at the state level, most likely, rather than the federal level because of the pardon. But it’s already moving underway. This is a serious matter. He should wind up in prison, and we’ve got the receipts in this book to put him there.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, the one term that I actually pulled out of the book, which you used, I think, several times, is undisclosed conflict of interest.

Mr. Navarro:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because that, well, it appears repeatedly.

Mr. Navarro:

Let me tell you about the cover-up, how this works. So in January, he meets with these experts. Ten out of twelve tell him this thing’s from the lab. He realizes that if that’s from the Wuhan lab, I probably did that by funding the research there. Right off the bat, he knows he’s trapped.

Mr. Jekielek:

Although he doesn’t say that in the diaries exactly, right?

Mr. Navarro:

He never says it. No, but what the diary tells us is that he knew. And so, by Occam’s razor, which I’m a big fan of, which is the simplest explanation, is likely the most plausible one. He’s got to be thinking, I must have done that. No, but what we’re looking for is a motive for what happened next. So let’s assume we don’t know whether he believed that at the time. What happened over the next six weeks was, in his diary, he says he prompted several of those researchers who said it was from the lab to go back and look at the problem and study it and then come back with a different conclusion. 

And weeks later, there’s this paper called the Proximal Origin paper that’s published with great fanfare that says, oh, this thing’s from nature. It’s not from the lab. Now, the authors of that were authors who were in the process of getting new grant money from Tony Fauci. Think about that. 

That’s part of the whole medical industrial complex. Tony Fauci’s power stemmed a lot from the grants that he could give to the research community, the contracts he could give to big pharma, and he could lord over that. So, six weeks later, all of a sudden, oh, that’s from Nature journal. At the same time, as part of the cover-up, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, separately signs a letter with other scientists for the Lancet, which is a prestigious scientific journal that says it’s from nature, not from the lab. And why was this important? 

It was essential because what I needed to know in order to get a vaccine and get some kind of remedy was the genome of the original virus. I can’t tell you how important that information would have been in real time at that time. We didn’t know what the genome was, and it quickly mutated and things like that. So, what Fauci did was hide his own culpability and the implicit conflict of interest. He’s telling everybody how to solve this thing. He doesn’t disclose his role in actually causing it, and chaos and authoritarianism ensue under his watch.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let me just mention our own experience or my own experience at that time. In April, we published a documentary titled Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus. You’re still allowed to call it that at the time. And we also experienced a lot of chagrin, let’s say, to put it lightly, as a result of that. And the argument was, looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Basically, Occam’s razor, exactly, another great way of putting it. We didn’t know many things, but we did know about this furin cleavage site, which is the thing that most people noticed at the beginning, right? So that was, and the other piece, I read this proximal origin letter in Nature Medicine and because of my training in evolutionary biology from some years before, I understood that it was false and I understood. You could see that really well. 

You could see it, I think, with a couple of years of undergrad biology, you should have been able to see that, I think. And that it was some of the biggest names, and in the biggest sub-journal of the biggest biology journal, and the whole thing essentially opened up my mind to looking at the whole pandemic and its response and everything very differently because I knew that people were lying, very, very prominent. People were lying for no reason. It wasn’t clear to me why at the time. So thank you for laying this all out quite in detail in here in your new book.

Mr. Navarro:

By the way, let’s not forget, as part of the obstruction, and this is criminal obstruction: That paper, Proximal Origin, was announced at the White House in the press room by Anthony Stephen Fauci, holding the paper up and saying, this proves it came from nature. And what didn’t he tell us? He didn’t tell us that he had prompted the whole production of that. He didn’t tell us that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Of the paper itself.

Mr. Navarro:

Of the paper, right. He didn’t tell us that the authors were recipients of grants from him. And he didn’t tell us that weeks before, those same authors had said that it was from the Wuhan lab. Look, there are going to be people watching this who still have a high opinion of Dr. Fauci. During a time of extreme anxiety and trouble in our nation, this man presented as an avuncular figure who seemed to be wise, who the media lauded and put up on a pedestal. He had his own bobbleheads. 

His diary, by the way, always talks about all the plaudits he would receive. He greatly enjoyed that in his own narcissism. But what I want to tell everybody is that what you see is not what you got. This man, from the very beginning, engaged first in an experiment with the world that backfired. And let me explain that.The logic of gain-of-function research funding in Tony Fauci’s mind was the following. I call them, I have nicknames in Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison for him. By the way, Amazon is the best place to get it. 

He had this vision: Let’s take harmless bat viruses and let’s use the gain-of-function research tools to turn them into killers. Now, why, Dr. Frankenstein, would you possibly want to do that? Well, his idea was, if I can manufacture these killer viruses, in the safety of a lab, then I can manufacture vaccines that can defend people against those killer viruses, so that if they ever do appear from nature, we'll be ready.

Mr. Jekielek:

And to be fair, I mean, it’s not just his idea. There were multiple people, including in that panel of 12, for sure, one example, very, very early on.

Mr. Navarro:

The two people who said it was from nature basically were ones who were working on the gain of function. You know, in the abstract, it sounds like a strategy you could pursue, but then it quickly turns into madness. Once you do two things: Once you allow for the possibility of a leak, which you always have to allow for with labs because there was plenty of evidence that labs leak. But more importantly, you’re sending this stuff to a Chinese Communist Party military lab working on bioweapons that didn’t like Donald Trump. I leave this as a question, not as a fact: the idea that it could be intentionally leaked. Again, the evidence here is in the book. 

There was a Chinese scientist affiliated with that lab who, within weeks of the pandemic, filed a patent for a vaccine. Now, that doesn’t happen unless that guy knew that the virus was being worked on in the lab. And if that guy knew that virus was being worked on in the lab, that means that they were preparing to use that virus somehow. So you can’t make this stuff up. And that diary, coupled with the facts we know, including a lot of the facts that your organization uncovered through dogged research while nobody else was willing to look at this, tells us a lot about what happened.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just one comment, you know, looking at emails between Fauci and people on the American side and people like George Gao on the China CDC and so forth, I found it fascinating because they’re like pals writing to each other almost as if the government is somehow, you know, their work, they have some sort of—I'll use the term—united front against these other people who don’t want science to go forward. And that is absolutely bizarre and fascinating to me. I keep thinking, have these people not been briefed on military-civil fusion doctrine in the Chinese government or in the Chinese regime and so forth?

Mr. Navarro:

And the answer is no. The answer is no. I mean, Fauci had no idea about IDAR, what I told you about earlier. I mean, it’s like there are so many naive American corporate executives. WHO [World Health Organization], starting in 2001, went over to China with their technologies thinking they were going to make a bundle and got just ripped off, right? But this is different because what Tony Fauci was exporting was a bioweapon essentially, or the tech to create, or the tech to create a bioweapon, right?

How do you not do your homework on the Wuhan lab? Okay, that lady has ties to the CCP, the Chinese military, and the Wuhan Lab creating viruses. What’s going on here? So I think what’s important for your audience about this book is that we all went through the pandemic. We all had our experience with it. We were locked down. 

You might not have been able to see your mother, your father, your grandparents. You might have had children who didn’t go to school, and now years later, you can tell that they lost those two years. There’s a whole chapter in the book. Why Fauci must rot in prison about long COVID, what they call long COVID, that somehow the whole vaccine booster medicine somehow upset. The immune system of people in ways that have left them with long-term symptoms that Fauci himself tried to dismiss, oh, that’s all in your mind. But now there are studies at Yale that show that long COVID, the immune, the vaccine-injured, that’s a better word for it, is very much real, and it needs to be dealt with. 

So, this is a book that I think will answer a lot of questions for people about how this started? Why did we do the kinds of things we did? Why couldn’t I get ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine back then? Why did I have to get the jab when I was a young, healthy man at risk of myocarditis from that? Why, as a woman in my first trimester, didn’t Tony Fauci tell me that there was a risk of miscarriage if I took the booster? This book, Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison, answers all of that. And ultimately, it asks the question; should Tony Fauci be prosecuted? And the answer is yes, and I show you how to do it.

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned something very interesting in the book, which is this idea that I hadn’t really considered: that to have a kind of a simple rule, a single one-size-fits-all policy, is somehow more protective to the bureaucracy than having a more nuanced approach. And can you just flesh that out for me a little?

Mr. Navarro:

Sure. It’s just easier to do. If everybody’s got to do it, then you don’t have to segment the population and police that, which is a little bit more of a heavy, heavy, heavy lift. And that was the thinking. Again, that’s why this is a tale of two diaries. You see, in the Fauci diary, Tony Fauci writing about the difficulties of reaching targeted populations as opposed to being a universal jab. His own doubts about whether everybody needs it, whether the children need it, whether, you know, at the dawn of the pandemic, we didn’t know what the R-naught was, which is the infection rate. 

We didn’t know who it would hit. It could have been different. It might have hit kids really hard, but we quickly learned it didn’t. We quickly learned that the most vulnerable were the senior citizens and people with comorbidities, full stop. And nobody else should or needed to get it because that interfered with what’s called herd immunity, which is the natural process of people getting the virus. Their immune system reacts to it, and then they become immune to it through that herd immunity.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, even herd immunity at the beginning was viewed as something that was a crazy idea, if you recall, which was just the most astonishing thing.

Mr. Navarro:

Yes. And it’s good science. He’s come to become a really good friend. I met him on Bannon’s War Room. Bannon’s War Room used to be called Pandemic War Room. It was the first kind of coverage that was honest, besides what you guys were doing about what was going on. And we published three articles in the Washington Times, which went through the science of all of this. And we talked about how the vaccine is leaky. Fauci promises publicly, for example, you take the vaccine once, and it’s a dead end, right? The virus, you never have to worry about it again. And then a few months later, just as Robert Malone and I said it would, mutations occur, and suddenly the vaccine is no longer good. 

So you have to get a booster. And then you have to get another booster. And then you have to get a third booster. And this is how it went. Any scientist that I had, guys like Dr. Stephen Hatfill, was working with me from day one. And he said, look, these things mutate all the time. You’re going to chase this thing, and you have to be smart about how you chase it. 

So there were just so many mistakes made by Fauci publicly. But in his diary, there were indications that he knew what was the right thing to do, but he just didn’t do it. And part of it was politics. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about that because, you know, Dr. Stephen Hatfill, one of the earliest guests that I had actually on about the pandemic back in, I guess it must have been early 2020. We talked about hydroxychloroquine, and he saw it as a very, you know, kind of a valuable tool against the pandemic. Of course, you were a champion of hydroxychloroquine yourself. You have a whole chapter dedicated in there, of course, and talking about Zev Zelenko. May he rest in peace. 

But why, looking back now, knowing what’s in the Fauci diaries, knowing what hindsight is 20/20, how did this battle against hydroxychloroquine, which of course was, you know, shown to be effective even in Zelenko’s own practice with actually quite a significant sample size. He worked with quite a number of people to show that it helped in the early stages of the disease, which is another element, right, but then, yes. So just explain to me what happened with hydroxy and ultimately why do you think it played out this way? Because obviously a lot of people didn’t make it that might have made it.

Mr. Navarro:

This is one of the great heartbreaks of my life, Jan, because as quartermaster of the pandemic in the White House, I literally had 65 million tablets of hydroxychloroquine that I was in the process of moving into the distribution channels. You start, there were about six main, I guess you'd call them wholesalers, that you would get those pills to. And then from there, they would go to pharmacies, where physicians would prescribe them, and to hospitals, where they would use them in-house. I was actively—those things were on the way when the hydroxy hysteria, motivated by Fauci and implemented by the FDA [U.S. Food & Drug Administration], hit and ground that to a halt. Okay, so the question is, what happened? 

Again, this is why this tale of two diaries, his and mine, is so interesting. In his diary, in early January, he says, use hydroxy. It’s safe. It’s worth trying it. Let me say that again. Tony Fauci himself said that hydroxychloroquine was a plausible, possible antiviral for the pandemic. Go ahead and do it. 

Now, my view, and I was on the inside the whole time, was that prior to the pandemic hitting, President Trump was a shoo-in for a landslide victory. Everything was going great until that pandemic hit. I think once the pandemic hit, the Left realized, particularly the media, the CNNs, the MSNBCs, and all of that, they saw a vulnerability to blame Trump for the pandemic. And this was not confined to the U.S. 

Virtually every political leader around the world who happened to draw the short straw, being in charge at the time, people were dying, and that leader was getting blamed. So I think that motivated the hydroxy hysteria because Zev Zelenko himself, who you mentioned, a country doctor who was using it with great success, I think in Pennsylvania, had contacted the president and said, hey, this works, try it. And the president had said that publicly. As soon as he said it, there was this mass reaction. 

And so if you’re watching this and you think that hydroxychloroquine could kill you, then you are a victim of hydroxychloroquine hysteria. But what Fauci said in his diary, and what I'll tell you here, is that that’s one of the safest drugs we have in the world. It’s safe because it’s been used for over 70 years for malaria, but more importantly, for lupus patients who use it every day of their lives for decades with far fewer problems than you see on TV every day with the drugs that Big Pharma advertises. You know how that goes; depression, then incontinence. 

And so Fauci flips like a month or so after he says in his diary, yes, it’s safe, use it. He’s waging a crusade against it that runs through the FDA. And the FDA makes one of the biggest medical mistakes in the world. They issue a decree which says, doctors can’t prescribe it. Can’t do that anymore. No off-label use. No, don’t do that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, they'll say that’s just guidance. That’s not a rule, yes.

Mr. Navarro:

And what they said was, it’s okay to use it in hospitals. Now, the problem with that is that hydroxy only works in the first seven days, early treatment. And the people who are in hospitals are, by definition, at or well past the seventh day. They’re in the cytokine storm, an era where they’re like, hanging on for dear life and maybe getting ready for a ventilator. Hydroxy doesn’t have the power to do that. So, effectively, what the FDA did was issue a death sentence. 

I can tell you, doing the simple math, 65 million tabs—eight for a course for one person—targets people who need it. I'd say there are 30,000 to 50,000 Americans who would be alive today if I had been able to do my thing with those 65 million, and get another 50 million, which I had on the way, those people would be alive today. 

Again, that’s blood on Tony Fauci’s hands. That’s why Tony Fauci must rot in prison. And it just broke my heart. I did everything possible I could, and I just got ripped by CNN, by MSNBC, by newspapers, and by this, that, and the other thing. I’m going, this is insanity.

Mr. Jekielek:

Something really interesting you did in there was that you have this short, I think it’s a chapter, where you juxtapose hydroxy and Paxlovid. If you could just summarize that for me.

Mr. Navarro:

The theory always is that Big Pharma is out to get us. And I think that’s right. They’re always like, you know, expensive pills; they make a ton of money. So, hydroxychloroquine costs pennies now; it’s a generic drug.And in my case, I was giving it away for free. What it does is it moderates your symptoms when you get COVID, and it reduces your risk of mortality. That’s a pretty good one-two punch. So they take that out of circulation, Fauci and Stephen Hahn at the FDA, and the woman who succeeded him, Janet Woodcock. 

These are bad people. They took hydroxy off the table. Meanwhile, Pfizer is working on what essentially is a replacement for hydroxy, like something you could take in early treatment. Oh, if you get diagnosed with the virus, take this. It'll moderate your symptoms and reduce your chances of dying. Okay, so what’s the difference between that and hydroxy? Well, there are two differences. 

First of all, cost. Pennies vs. something like $2,000 for the cycle. That’s real money. So Pfizer’s making out like a bundle. But the funny part of the whole thing, it’s darkly funny. It’s like one of the funniest things I read in the Fauci diary: Paxlovid, for a not small amount of people who would take it had what was called the Paxlovid rebound. 

So that you‘d take the drug, you’d feel better for a little bit, wouldn’t die, and then boom, that virus would hit you again harder. So Fauci was writing about that in his diary. It happened to him. And what he did was malpractice for a doctor: he decided to take a second course of Paxlovid to treat the rebound. And then he got another rebound. And it’s like, his lung almost collapsed. He came close to dying. That’s the guy we put our trust in. 

So that’s what I call the medical-industrial complex. There’s a whole chapter in Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison about that. Who’s in that? It’s the grants, the people who get the grants, the people who give the grants. It’s Big Pharma. It’s the medical insurer. They don’t have our interests in mind. They have their interest in mind.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, the thing that I found most fascinating in that section is that, you know, it was the level of credulity that was offered, the difference in the level of credulity, or the standard by which hydroxychloroquine was judged and Paxlovid was judged.

Mr. Navarro:

Oh, that’s interesting. This is the trials issue. It’s like you’re in the middle of the pandemic, okay? If you’re in the middle of a pandemic, you don’t have time for randomized controlled trials, okay? And you don’t have the ethics to do that either, because if people are dying, you don’t do a randomized controlled trial test of a drug and have half the people not get it and die if this thing could have a possibility of working. 

But Fauci used the excuse of not having RCTs [randomized controlled trials] for hydroxychloroquine when he did his little flip on that. And what’s interesting, Jan, is there’s an 1100-page diary, but there’s also a second 500-page diary that goes back in time, and also information that I wrote about in the book, In Trump Time, about Fauci essentially doing the same thing in the AIDS epidemic with a different set of drugs that he did for hydroxychloroquine. 

In other words, he withheld a cocktail of drugs that were demonstrably productive in helping to save lives during the AIDS epidemic. And one of the famous, I think his name is Larry Kramer, AIDS activist, calculated that 13,000 people died because of Fauci back then. So that was one of the chapters, and it is called Dress Rehearsal. And essentially, what Fauci did, the way he handled that, was essentially a dress rehearsal for how he would handle the pandemic.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and so this is one of the most fascinating things in your new book that I just didn’t know about yet until I read it, which is what you call the prequel diaries, and just looking back and seeing certain patterns, you use them to set up certain patterns of behavior or approaches or these undisclosed conflicts and so forth. Tell me a little bit about those, yes.

Mr. Navarro:

Let me tell you about the first time I met Tony Fauci. If you remember the timeframe, things started happening in December, right, that seemed off in Wuhan. By January, we were seeing brown skies over Wuhan, which is a very big city. What is it, 20 million, 18 million people live there? This is a very big city. People don’t understand; they think Wuhan is some product. No, it’s a big city. Brown clouds all over the city in a haze, bodies burning, right? Something was going on there. 

So, the president called me in the evening and said, hey, task force meeting tomorrow in the Situation Room. I need my travel ban. Go close that deal. So I went in there. The acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was chairing the meeting.

It was one of the first meetings of what would become the task force. You had Alex Azar there, who was the Secretary of Health and Human Services. You had Stephen Biegun from the State Dept., kind of all these globalist-type of guys. I was sitting there, and across from me was somebody I‘d never seen before. I knew all the other guys because I’d see them in the normal course of business. But these guys would turn out to be Fauci and Robert Redfield of the CDC. They were sitting right across from me. And within three minutes, I was in a loud argument with this guy.

I didn’t know he walked on water, didn’t know his poop didn’t stink. All he could keep saying was travel bans don’t work. I go, wait a minute. You’re telling me if you get 20,000 people coming in from a hot zone in China into our country, you want them to get off a plane and walk into our daily population? Is that what you want? 

He goes, well, travel bans don’t work. Travel bans don’t work. I’m thinking arrogance and stupidity, a bad combination. This is what I thought of the guy before I even knew who he was. What’s interesting about the prequel diary was he had the same discussion about Ebola in Africa. That’s a thing that if you get Ebola, 50/50, you’re dead. He didn’t want travel bans back then.  But it’s a completely different form of transmission. You have to be up close and personal. 

Whereas, this one is almost certainly airborne, right? So he’s not capable of flexibility in his thinking, what that demonstrates. You compare those two diaries. In a way, It was a funny ending to the meeting, because Mulvaney, who’s this free marketer, libertarian guy, the idea of a travel ban offended his sensibilities. So he was on Fauci’s side. 

He goes, I guess there’s consensus in the room. We’re not going to do the travel ban. And I go, there’s no consensus in this room, Mick. And the National Security Council guy, Matt Pottinger, pipes up and says, yes, Mick, no consensus here. NSC supports the travel ban. And then we leave. 

For your audience’s background, I’m a Ph.D. economist, and I got a degree from Harvard University. My specialty is macro-forecasting and analysis. So I go back and look at this. I work with the Council of Economic Advisors, and I predict with what turned out to be surprising accuracy, the number of people who would likely die and how much it would cost the economy if we didn’t do the travel ban. 

I pulled the oldest bureaucratic trick in the book. I papered everybody with that memo, not just the 12 people who were in the situation room, but the 100 others who were part of the chain that were listening in on that and everything like that.  And once you put a memo out that says a lot of people are going to die and this is going to cost a lot of money, nobody’s going to take responsibility for opposing the policy. So we got the travel ban. 

But that would be the only major victory I would have against Tony Fauci. And I would fight him subsequently on Hydroxy. I'd fight him on the lockdowns. I was talking on TV and in The New York Times, months before the Great Barrington Declaration, about how the lockdowns would likely kill more people than the virus itself. I fought him. And in the vaccines, I want to say for the record, I helped get that vaccine research going fast at warp speed. And the president and I did exactly the right thing you should do in a pandemic. The mistake of the vaccine wasn’t to create the vaccine, the mistake was to force it on everybody. 

By the way, Pfizer refused to divulge certain data which would have revealed just how much danger there actually was. So we did the right thing in the Trump administration. We handed that off to Biden. Biden makes Fauci his chief medical advisor, and then Fauci makes everybody get that jab, and people die.

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to comment a little bit. You mentioned being on the travel ban, you were massively pro travel ban. You got that to happen. Also, the amount of information we had at that time was different from the amount of information by the time lockdowns were being discussed, right? And we understood that it was not nearly as lethal as some of the models promoted.

Mr. Navarro:

But we didn’t know the R-naught right off the bat.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it was coming from China, and it looked to a lot of people like it could be a bioweapon or a lab leak of gain of function. I mean, this was just…

Mr. Navarro:

When you see clouds over a city of 20 million people from crematoria, you know that that’s a serious, serious matter. And within the West Wing, other than President Trump, there weren’t enough people taking it seriously. I was the only guy in there working early in February on getting the PPE. And that came naturally to me because I was the guy, the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing, who had been trying to onshore those capabilities to begin with before we even had the pandemic. But it was a learning experience. The 14 days to stop the spread, it was a reasonable policy to do. It was done very earnestly. 

We didn’t understand how herd immunity might actually be a good alternative, and we didn’t have the data to support it. And it was the fog of pandemic war. But that fog would go away. It didn’t take months. It'd take a matter of weeks. Following the gospel of Fauci, mistakes were made. The whole lockdown thing in and of itself was so unnecessary to go so long. 

Let me say one other thing about the lockdown so your folks understand. So, in my profession,I have focused a lot on Communist China’s mercantilist policies, putting good people in America out of work in their factories. And part of the fallout of what the CCP does with their mercantilism to America is not just the loss of wages and factories. But it’s the social, what we call the socioeconomic impacts. 

It’s like people who have a high school education, earning a great living in a factory, get laid off, and the next step down is a big step down. And so you get alcoholism, you get depression, you get drug use, you get increased crime, you get divorce rates going up, you get all of that kind of stuff. And so I understood that within the China shock context. 

So it was fairly easy for me to see within the context of the lockdown that if you lock people up, you deprive them of a livelihood, being able to see their relatives and friends that that was going to cause problems. And by the way, not being able to go see a doctor to see if he had cancer or some other disease and therefore put off treatments. So, that was a big deal. 

And that was, again, like I’m a doctor, he’s a doctor. I do economics, he does medical. He was looking at it through the narrow medical lens. I’m looking at it at the macro level. And I got it right. He got it wrong.

Mr. Jekielek:

Number one of the things that made me realize that President Trump, in his first candidacy back in 2015, 2016, was serious about China because I'd watched many presidential candidates previously, as you did, I’m sure, commit themselves to countering China, and then once they stepped into the role, would do the opposite. And the reason that I knew that President Trump was, as a candidate, serious was because he tapped you, and you had written Death by China, which actually was profoundly influential to my own thinking. And I appreciate you for that. I have not, I did not see the movie. I did not see the movie.

Mr. Navarro:

It’s on YouTube, it’s free. I’m not going to make you pay for it. It’s a real movie. It was on Netflix actually for three years. It went in the theaters, stuff like that. Netflix eventually bounced it for woke reasons. But, you know, that’s another story. I went out in the field and did that. You know how good movies get made, good documentaries, talking to small folks who lost their jobs, who had to deal with the daily pressures and stuff like that. 

But this Fauci, I just, I mean, what a, it’s just so extraordinary that a guy who looks in all likelihood, was responsible for the creation of the pandemic, could get a bobblehead and millions of dollars in fortune out of that and not be held accountable. You can’t make that up. 

But with this story, the ending’s not written yet, Jan. And that’s what I’m trying to do with why Fauci must rot in prison to write the ending where he is held accountable for all of the misery that he imposed on. On just about everybody in this world. I don’t think anybody had a good time during that pandemic. Still looking for that person besides Fauci.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, so, you know, absolutely, you make a case and you look at, you have your own experience way from the, right from the very beginning, which is, which is in itself fascinating, you know, those, those, you know, juxtaposing your own work versus Dr. Fauci’s work, and you offer people an opportunity to make up their own mind, too, which I like. You don’t present yourself as an impartial arbiter, you have your own very strong opinions as you always have, and I would argue, as on the China side, you know, very well informed ones, certainly. And yes, no, it’s an absolutely fascinating book. I have to tell you, it was a book I was not expecting.

Mr. Navarro:

I appreciate it. I really appreciate you covering this. And I appreciate what The Epoch Times does. It’s unfortunate that so much of the criminal behavior of the CCP is normalized so that it’s just China being China. But it has real consequences for our economy, for our society, for our political system, for our national defense. And in this particular case, I want to get to the bottom of the CCP’s role in the pandemic. And one way to do that is to get Fauci on the stand, get him subpoenaed, put him on trial. Let’s figure out what happened in Wuhan, and we'll all be better off.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Peter Navarro, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Navarro:

I appreciate it. It’s been a good discussion, and it’s a tale of two diaries, so I hope people enjoy reading it, and it’s going to answer a lot of questions for people. And I do want to stress one last thing: there is a chapter if you’re suffering from vaccine injury or long COVID. Read the book because there’s help in there as well.

Mr. Jekielek:

On that note, I'll also mention that during the pandemic, we made a film just basically cataloging that reality of vaccine injury, because for a number of years, you just weren’t allowed to talk about it at all. I think that has started to shift now, thankfully. Certainly, I imagine a lot of people will read your book, and I think maybe they will also learn about this aspect. 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.