Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote in 2025 that a reckoning was needed to deal with the catastrophic failures at every level of society during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure," Dr. Atlas wrote in the Wall Street Journal in March 2025.
"Why does nobody want to talk about the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics in our lifetimes?" Atlas asks.
I would amend that last observation and make it the most "tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics" in the history of free governments. What Antony Fauci's shockingly arrogant, wrongheaded diary entries can provide is a supercharged catalyst for finally getting a reckoning for all those who failed so stupidly, so spectacularly, that led not only to millions of unnecessary deaths, but trillions in lost GDP over the next decades and an entire generation of children condemned to academic underachievement.
I put it this way last year:
The elite institutions at fault include the media, Congress, the public health establishment, teachers, religious folk, big business, and the executive branch of the U.S. government. They were all wrong about many, many aspects of the pandemic and caused incalculable, generational harm to hundreds of millions of people.
I do not believe this is an exaggeration. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data shows that 13-year-olds continue to struggle. Scores in reading and mathematics for this group have plateaued below pre-pandemic levels. Because these students experienced major school disruptions during their foundational elementary years, the academic loss has proven harder to make up as they transition into high school.
Not only that, the performance gap between top-tier students (90th percentile) and struggling students (10th percentile) has widened significantly across most core subjects. Record shares of students are falling below the "NAEP Basic" threshold, particularly in 12th-grade math (45% below basic) and reading (32% below basic).
This is a direct, quantifiable result of the lengthy and unnecessary school closures and lockdowns and the spectacular failure of replacing classroom instruction with "remote learning."
It wasn't just the schools, of course. Shutting down the entire economy on the advice of Fauci (who publicly denied responsibility but whose diary makes it clear he was responsible) proved catastrophic. The stay-at-home orders, "non-essential" business closures, and consumer behavioral shifts triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic led directly to the 2020 COVID recession. Despite its short duration, the economic drop was historic. U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) plunged at an annualized rate of 31.4% in the second quarter of 2020.
With that steep a downturn, Donald Trump tried to bring the economy to a soft landing by getting Congress to pass a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill. It largely worked as designed. That is, until Joe Biden took office.
Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion "American Rescue Plan" had little to do with COVID relief and everything to do with being a gigantic slush fund for Democratic interest groups. Teachers, unions, and racial, gender, and other radical-left NGOs were fed well and often. It was a multi-trillion-dollar free-for-all, using COVID-19 as an excuse to cement the loyalty of Democratic cadres to the party. American history had never seen anything like it.
It all began with Antony Fauci.
Dr. Fauci had spent most of his 35-year career in infectious diseases falsely warning of apocalyptic scenarios that never happened. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail to be pounded. In the 1980s he was wrong about heterosexual AIDS. In the early 2000s he was wrong about the avian flu. Same with the Zika virus. Not only did he overestimate death rates from virtually every virus of the last 30 years, he often overestimated fatalities by five to 10 times the actual numbers. A palm reader would have been more accurate.
Why anyone ever listened to Dr. Fauci is a great mystery. What’s worse is that even though we know he caused irreparable damage to the health and well-being of our children, he is still in some circles regarded as a hero. He still gives commencement addresses at major universities. The Biden administration actually hung a portrait of a smiling Dr. Fauci near the entrance of the National Portrait Gallery.
The diaries reveal a man besotted with aspirations for power and fame, congratulating himself for all the coverage his appearances were getting and how the starry-eyed media had fallen in love with him. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been Fauci's number one nemesis for four years of Senate hearings. He's exposed Fauci as a liar about gain-of-function research and COVID precautions, among other topics.
I don't really care if Fauci goes to prison. He's an old man (85), and appeals would keep him free for years. It would be far more useful if he and the rest of the COVID charlatans, scam artists, and bloodsuckers were forced to testify before a "Truth Commission." We absolutely must find a way to identify those responsible for this fiasco and criminal incompetence, and somehow ensure the same mistakes aren't repeated when Mother Nature sends another deadly bug to bedevil us.
Recommended: One Cold War Law Is Keeping Thousands of Inventions From Being Marketed
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
Help us continue to report on President Trump's successes. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member