Like the rest of us, Anthony Fauci is far from perfect. His influential guidance, as the country’s top infectious-disease specialist during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, certainly didn’t get everything right.

A great deal about the deadly disease – where it came from, how it spread, how best to protect the public – was unknown, or was being learned midstream, during a crisis.

Decisions needed to be made in real time, and those decisions had major consequences.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see more clearly. It’s easy to second-guess Fauci, and others who guided policy about masks, research and closures of businesses and schools.

But surely, the 85-year-old physician and immunologist doesn’t deserve what’s happening right now, as a highly politicized Republican-led Senate committee attempted to humiliate him, possibly trap him into perjuring himself, and then voted – along party lines – to hold him in contempt of Congress.

No surprise, really, that Fauci, now retired from his public post, invoked the fifth amendment more than 100 times during last week’s Senate committee hearing.

That’s the action that – though reasonable enough given all the circumstances – is the supposed impetus for holding him in contempt. Now the committee has referred the........

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