As laid out on today’s forthcoming Three Martini Lunch podcast, it’s understandable that critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci are frustrated by his performance before the Senate today, repeating “under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment” like a malfunctioning Westworld robot. (Note that former president Joe Biden’s pardon of Fauci covers January 1, 2014, to January 19, 2025. It would not cover perjury, contempt of Congress, or any other crime committed after January 19, 2025.)

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But I think today’s performance is strengthening the anti-Fauci argument and weaking the pro-Fauci argument; I think you find fewer Fauci superfans in the circles of Democratic elites today than you did in 2021, and no one is quite as eager to run to the ramparts to defend Fauci’s reputation as they were a few years ago.

Exhibit A would be this morning’s article in The Atlantic, “The Unmaking of Anthony Fauci,” by Katherine Wu. It is, by and large, still a sympathetic portrait, emphasizing the terrible toll that criticism from Republicans and the Trump administration, and the death threats against him and his family from unhinged maniacs.

But here and there, the Wu profile concedes that Fauci was not quite the saint that the mainstream media coverage made him out to be:

Certainly, Fauci made mistakes. Early on, for instance, he advised against the widespread use of masks amid a shortage of them and then reversed that position. “I don’t think the communication around that was particularly good,” Emily Erbelding, a former........

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