It’s probably a good thing that Fauci will not be in charge for the next public-health emergency.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced that he will be stepping down in December from his positions as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. He will depart after 50 years of government service — including 38 years as NIAID director. In that position, he has overseen government responses to every major infectious-disease threat of the past four decades, including, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. Sadly, this last episode of his long and distinguished career was not his finest hour.

Fauci advocated the imposition of severe lockdown measures, including general mask mandates, despite the fact that there was no scientific evidence to support them. An influential 2006 article by D. A. Henderson and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center concluded that serious mitigation measures such as stay-at-home orders, school closures, and generalized mask wearing were unlikely to make a significant difference in a new pandemic but that they could adversely affect the provision of medical care and other essential services and have serious economic consequences. A pre-pandemic review by the highly regarded Cochrane Library also found that medical/surgical mask-wearing made little or no difference in the outcome of respiratory, influenza-like illnesses compared with not wearing a mask. Multiple pre-2020 pandemic plans prepared by the WHO, the CDC, and the health agencies of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden had rejected lockdowns as a legitimate strategy in the event of a new pandemic.