Tony Fauci’s announcement yesterday that he would finally step down from a public health post that he has parlayed over thirty-eight years into one of the most powerful – and the highest compensated – in the federal administrative state is a kind of Rorschach test.

Those who have seen Dr. Fauci as the heroic scientist who valiantly, and successfully, led the response to the COVID-19 pandemic are anguished by his retirement in December. For those of us perceiving him instead as the villainous uber-bureaucrat whose role reflected not hard science, but personal calculation and benefit, his departure is long-overdue and can’t come soon enough. 

The question is: Will Fauci be held accountable, for example, for the consequences of his enabling the Chinese Communist Party’s biological warfare program to use U.S. funds and technology to create the coronavirus that has killed a million of us?

This is Frank Gaffney.