Good afternoon.Dr Anthony Fauci, the pandemic-era US chief medical adviser, has described a book by News Corp investigative journalist Sharri Markson backing the “lab leak” theory of Covid-19’s origins as a “bunch of nonsense” in his newly released diaries.This week, Fauci, 85, was subpoenaed by the Republican senator Rand Paul to appear at a Senate hearing on the origins of Covid-19, where he refused to answer questions, invoking the fifth amendment and accusing Paul of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.Ahead of Fauci’s appearance, Paul published 1,141 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era journal entries, Caitlin Cassidy reports. In the entries, Fauci criticised reporting in The Australian newspaper and a book by Markson that claimed a facility in Wuhan was “immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments”.Fauci, who served under seven US presidents but became a household name in 2020, wrote in his private diary that Markson’s reporting “does not make any sense”.But Markson backed her work, saying she “led the way internationally exposing the role of Anthony Fauci’s agency funding 65 projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funnelling the money through EcoHealth Alliance”.Top news