In October 2020, from inside the White House, I stopped attending the Coronavirus Task Force meetings. I wrote to the vice president’s office in frustration that I had no time to spend teaching people who were “refractory to facts.” I did not yet understand that this was not confined to that room or that time.

Six years later, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate and invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than explain his actions when he commandeered the destructive pandemic policies. They referred him to the Justice Department for contempt. As expected, he has conceded no error.

Like Fauci, there will be no admission of failure by those who led the response with him. Deborah Birx, the official leader of the medical recommendations as Task Force Coordinator, wrote all the federal guidance and sent it to the governors and local health officials. She visited the states, cajoling them to mandate pseudoscience, like six-foot spacing and masks, while villainizing the few governors who didn't listen.

Part of the problem can be traced to the delusion of omniscience by those typically in the background, suddenly given unprecedented fame and power. Public health officials are bureaucrats, not normally sought after by major media outlets and gracing magazine covers. And the susceptibility to this is nothing new. The powerful force of delusion has been known for thousands of years. In Homer's "Iliad," delusion descended on a person via the daughter of Zeus to cloud their thinking. It was an irresistible external force then, not attributed to any character flaw that the person bore.

No doubt, Birx's silence is also due to embarrassing exposure of her hypocrisy of epic proportions in December 2020, when she held her own Thanksgiving family gathering, despite admonishing on Meet the Press then that “We cannot go into the holiday season —........

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