Being a powerful advocate of draconian and ineffective COVID responses that hurt Americans means never having to say you’re sorry.

We learned that anew this week as two of the country’s most well-known policy setters, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Randi Weingarten, were called upon to reckon with what their ideas had wrought.

Reckon they did not.

“I sleep fine,” Fauci told a sympathetic New York Times reporter in yet another in-depth retrospective on his role in American COVID pandemic policy. “I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.”

Well, he was “perceived as the personification” because he never met a camera lens whose social distance he wouldn’t violate and because he referred to himself as the personification of science.

Meanwhile, before a Wednesday COVID-response oversight hearing on school closures in Congress, American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten did a similar dance — a sort of reverse-Spider-Man: “With great power comes no responsibility.”

Weingarten is a powerful political force in the Democratic Party. She and her allies in Democratic politics used their leverage to keep school doors closed to students for more than a year, with catastrophic results for the learning and mental health of those students.

The school closures were the longest in modern history, they were more draconian than the rest of the developed world, they were at odds with the proof all around this country in private schools and in red-state public schools that schools could indeed open safely.

“We tried to do something that no one else was trying to do,” she said, expressing a surprising ignorance of the rest of the nation, private schools and Europe.

In fact, insisting schools were unsafe was out of step with the science of COVID, which showed that schools didn’t reflect or exacerbate community spread and instead were often less dangerous than the community at large.

This wasn’t something unknowable but being demonstrated daily right down the street from shuttered public schools as early as spring 2020 in Europe and fall 2020 in America.

Instead of looking to neighbors who served children better, she served her organization and its members by arguing closed schools needed billions and billions of taxpayer money to reopen “safely.”

They got some $60 billion in the 2020 CARES Act and another $122 billion in the American Rescue Plan, most of which remains unspent and some of which was not spent on reopening schools.

Let me explain the simple trick Weingarten and her supporters in Congress act like you are too dumb to understand.

Yes, Weingarten technically said we should open schools “safely” throughout the pandemic. She then always followed that call with demands for standards she knew well would prevent opening, ignoring safe openings elsewhere.

A good example of this was in March 2021 — a full year after some schoolchildren had set foot in a classroom, after teachers had been bumped to the front of the line in many cities to get back to school and after Congress had allocated billions for them. She said all they needed to go back was a testing regimen like the NFL’s.

“We wanted to be in school; I’ve said that over and over again today.”

And yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance she and her organization helped shape in early 2021 would have had many schools that were already open for full-time in-person instruction close due to community transmission if they had taken the CDC at its word.

As one member of the oversight committee put it, it could more properly have been called a guide to closing schools than opening them.

Republican Rep. Rich McCormick, an ER doctor in Georgia, cut to the heart of the issue when he asked Weingarten if she believes public schools are an essential service.

“Yes,” she replied without hesitation, before McCormick noted that he did his job in person at the outset and throughout the pandemic.

“I get that it’s scary,” McCormick said. But, alas, he was not among the special category of essential workers Weingarten advocated for who did not have to return to in-person duty and whose essential services were closed.

He asked Weingarten: If she had it to do over again, would she advocate for teachers to go back earlier?

“I regret COVID,” she said. “I regret the fear that was there and part of the reason we wanted clear information was because we had a role in [mitigating] that fear. . . . There were a lot of things we didn’t get right.”

She ignored clear information right outside her doors. She fanned the flames of fear.

This is as close as anyone will probably get to hearing a mea culpa from Weingarten, whose allies in Congress argued Wednesday that critiquing this devastating policy decision is a useless and partisan activity, and we should instead join together to give more money to education at Weingarten’s recommendation.

“The work we need to do now . . . is how we engage them socially and emotionally and meet the whole child. That’s why we are proposing big expansions. We need more funding, not less,” she said.

Since the onset of the pandemic, public trust in public health and public education have cratered.

The continued gaslighting from the leaders of COVID response like Fauci and Weingarten is a perfect picture of why.

If we keep paying the arsonists to run the fire trucks, we shouldn’t be surprised when they burn it all down.