Fauci's emails show how he was flooded with concerns for his health, interview requests, and dubious PPE ideas at the start of the pandemic. He sometimes replied in the dead of night.

• Hundreds of pages of Dr. Fauci's emails show requests for advice, interviews, and keynote speeches.
• A Gates Foundation exec emailed Fauci with concerns over his health, per a report by The Washington Post.
• Fauci replied to many of the emails - sometimes late at night.

Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails show that he was inundated with interview requests, calls for advice, and even a suggestion to use dog cones as PPE as he worked alongside the White House to develop the US' COVID-19 response at the start of the pandemic.

The Washington Post published 866 pages of emails sent both by and to Dr. Anthony Fauci in March and April 2020, which show how the nation's top infectious-disease expert was under immense pressure, dealing with a deluge of emails from colleagues, hospital administrators, the press, foreign governments, and strangers.

Fauci responded to many of his emails, The Post found - sometimes late at night.

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Some asked for advice or voiced their support for Fauci's work, while others criticized his response to the pandemic.

The medical director of the National Football League Players Association, for example, asked Fauci if he could confidentially brief him on how to safely start the next NFL season, while PayPal asked if Fauci could speak to its 23,000 employees.

An official at the Department of Health and Human Services suggested to Fauci that people could use "doggie cones" to solve the shortage of personal protective equipment, to which Fauci sent a polite thank you, per The Post.

A top executive at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, meanwhile, emailed Fauci with concerns over his health.

"I see you on TV almost every day, and although you continue to have considerable energy, I am seriously worried about you," Emilio Emini wrote in an email exchange about vaccine development in April 2020. "The nation and the world absolutely need your leadership."

Fauci responded at 1:53 a.m., saying: "I will try to engage as much as I can given my current circumstances."

Fauci was inundated with media requests too, per The Post's report. This included a request to co-write an op-ed. Fauci asked his staff: "How do we nicely say no to this person?"

The emails showed Fauci's concerns about the pandemic and his attitude to his work.

"I have said in the past that what keeps me up at night is the possibility of a pandemic respiratory infection," Fauci said in one email to a senior official in the Office of the Surgeon General in the Army and US Army Medical Command in April 2020, published by The Post.

"We are in that now, and what keeps me up at night is the response, a major part of which is the development of an effective vaccine and treatments for COVID-19."

BuzzFeed also published more than 3,200 pages of Fauci's emails from January to June 2020, with Fauci saying in from February 5, 2020 that he was "hanging in there."

"Feels like my internship and first year residency when I was on every other night and every other weekend, but actually never left the hospital because the patients were so sick," Fauci wrote.