Last week, the office of Senator Rand Paul released a trove of notes made by Dr Anthony Fauci during the early years of the Covid pandemic. With their relentless, at times even parodic, obsession with publicity, they do not paint a flattering picture. Besides meticulously listing each day’s appearances on radio and television shows, Fauci revels in recounting his brushes with fame, often cutting and pasting laudatory press coverage in its entirety. This focus makes the diary discordant with the professional challenges of facing the burgeoning pandemic.

Reading some of the early notes included in the diary shows Fauci’s glee at fame. In the early days of the pandemic, the former White House chief Covid advisor is excited to have the conservative commentator Lou Dobbs vouch for his intelligence to Donald Trump, and even more excited to meet with — and be showered with compliments — the President himself. A month later, the normal bureaucratic wrangling turns into an “amazing day” when he is first booked on Chris Cuomo’s show and then receives a 20-minute call from Trump on his home phone.

Though any number of its entries are embarrassing in isolation, Fauci’s diary is legitimately troubling when viewed in its entirety. The monomaniacal focus on his own fame, the staggering self-regard, and the petty sniping at his critics are a world away from the persona of the calm, informed medical authority much of the public came to trust.

It is important to note that the documents have not been made public as a mere attempt at character assassination. Instead, they are the latest salvo in the half-decade war between Senator Paul and Fauci over the origins of the Covid pandemic. The introductory page attached to the document by Senator Paul’s office — a page that is inexplicably styled with the aesthetic of a middle schooler’s diary — focuses exclusively on comparing Fauci’s private notes, which acknowledge the possibility that Covid could have been a product of genetic manipulation, with his public statements to the contrary.

In this sense, the release of the documents addresses wider concerns over the response to the pandemic. The letter’s line of argument is just one piece of the far-reaching debate over whether Covid jumped straight from animal to human or if it was first subjected to gain-of-function research in a Wuhan laboratory before somehow breaking containment. Senator Paul believes the latter, and that health authorities have a long history of criminal carelessness, views which have repeatedly brought him into conflict with Fauci.

As grubby as the whole thing is, and degrading as it makes a man who spent a career fashioning himself into a titan of public health look, there’s nothing particularly surprising about the diary. Neither is it shocking for a Senator to relentlessly pursue a cause in which he can legitimately claim to be serving the public interest even as he settles a personal score. Politicians, whether elected or appointed, rarely possess much in the way of humility.

But the most visible political legacy of the pandemic being a protracted vendetta points to the ongoing failure of public health institutions. Some technologies of the Covid era, like rapid vaccine development and improved disease monitoring, will prove useful the next time a novel pathogen threatens the country. But their utility will be limited without a broadly trusted authority to explain their purpose.

There has been no agreed accounting of Covid’s legacy. The commission tasked with judging the successes and failures of the official response came and went. We have reached no collective agreement on how to assess imperfect evidence or weigh freedom against safety, despite going from Republican to Democratic and back to Republican administrations. As the pandemic rapidly recedes, willfully forgotten like the collective nightmare it was, the possibility of such a reconciliation goes with it, leaving behind little but acrimony and a sense that there will be no quick consensus on how to respond to the next pandemic.