The disgrace this week of Dr. Anthony Fauci allows America to look back on the awful COVID year of 2020, aptly with 20/20 hindsight. His stonewalling of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) homeland security panel — he “pled the Fifth” 111 times — and the release of his diaries allow us to revisit and assess the arrogance and smug narcissism that was instrumental in inflicting such a huge moral and economic cost on the nation.

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the octogenarian Fauci became poster boy for the pandemic response. He loved, craved, and documented all the attention he received; Hollywood swooned; leftist news outlets and lapdog pundits abused anyone who questioned his multitudinous falsehoods.