ROGER KIMBALL: Anthony Fauci’s metaphysical get-out-of-jail-free card.

Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas. We’ve known for some time now that he was involved with, and paid with taxpayer money for, “gain of function” research at the Wuhan virology lab where the novel coronavirus that has caused such upheaval was developed.

Yes, that’s right. Fauci was paid by your tax dollars to help weaponize a virus that he then went on to exploit as a means to enhance his lugubrious celebrity.

He lied, under oath, about his role in his testimony before Congress, most pointedly in his heated exchanges with Senator Rand Paul this last summer.

Now we have Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, publicly challenging Fauci, charging that he is guilty of spreading “misinformation” about taxpayer funding of Fauci’s “gain of function” research at the Chinese virology laboratory.

Of course, “misinformation” in this case is just a polysyllabic synonym for lying — and besides wasn’t it Jen Psaki herself wanted people to be punished for spreading “misinformation”?

Yes, but she didn’t mean people like Fauci, who is on team A and is therefore exempt from public obloquy, not to mention federal prosecution.

You understand this, right? If you are part of the nomenklatura, you are endowed with a sort of metaphysical get-out-of-jail-free card, an immunity inscribed like a vaccine confirmation on your soul. You can lie to Congress, lie to the FBI, lie to the public with impunity. More than that, if you are part of the nomenklatura’s shock troops — a member, for example, of antifa or Black Lives Matter — then you can burn down police stations and destroy private property with impunity — nay, you can be hailed as a hero, a campaigner for “social justice.”

As Dana Loesch tweeted last night, after the NIH admitted it funded gain of function research, “Lot of people owe [Rand Paul] an apology.”