Cynicism of the highest order.

FILE – Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

On January 20, 2025 – just hours before President Joe Biden was to leave office – it was announced that he had issued a pre-emptive pardon to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

You remember Lord Fauci. He was the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I am the science,” he once said to an interviewer. In his role as head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, he drove an entire nation into what amounted to house arrest.

To “stop the spread,” schools and churches were closed, the elderly died alone in nursing homes, uncomforted by family, small businesses were forced to close, and tens of millions of nominally free American citizens had to give up their livelihoods.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve” turned into two years of economic and social devastation. Small independent retailers and mom & pop restaurants were forced to shut down. They went out of business. But Target and Wal-Mart got to stay open. Their stock prices soared. Many of the former owners of the small businesses that were shut down now face their retirement years with little to get them by.

Young children who were kept from going to kindergarten and early elementary school are now teenagers and a huge percentage of them are behind academically and will likely never catch up.

Fauci had us maintaining six feet of social distancing while walking around with dirty masks on our faces in an affront to epidemiological science.

And it was his Lordship Anthony Fauci who convinced President Trump to fast track the development of mRNA vaccines in an effort that got dubbed “Operation Warp Speed.”

“Fine,” we all said.

But here’s what’s now coming to light that’s not fine.

For the drug makers to develop The Jab they demanded protection from product liability. Under the rules, to get that protection, the drugs would have to be deployed under an Emergency Use Authorization – EUA – from the Food & Drug Administration. But to get an EUA, there could be no other “approved, adequate and available” therapies.

The problem was that there was plenty of evidence that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin – two readily available and inexpensive drugs with long use histories – were quite effective at treating COVID when administered early in the course of the disease.

The government spent more than $30 billion on The Jab. Drug makers Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, in turn, paid hundreds of millions in royalties to Fauci’s agency to license government-owned technology in their development. There are persistent but admittedly unproven rumors that Fauci profited personally from some of those payments. We’ll never know.

What we do know is that Fauci aggressively and often ruthlessly set out to crush any use of HCQ and ivermectin, their low risk and demonstrated effectiveness be damned.

What we’ll also never know is how many people died needlessly because Fauci quashed an inexpensive and low risk therapy in an apparent attempt to further his empire.

But what we always will know is that the Biden administration thought that he needed a pardon.