I’ll never forget how much I liked Dr. Anthony Fauci when I first heard him speak — how given I was to trusting him. It was early March in 2020, and the local AM talk station was replaying an interview he'd given to 60 Minutes the night before. Fauci was measured and assertive in his responses, yet nonideological and willing to tell hard truths, particularly about the futility of wearing masks. It was disappointing to hear — at that point, we all wanted to believe in a workable solution — but his explanation made perfect sense.

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci told interviewer Jon LaPook. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”

His comments mirrored what we’d been hearing elsewhere in the media from people we were meant to trust. Only days before the 60 Minutes interview, Rachel Maddow had gone on The Tonight Show and told Jimmy Fallon that “masks are probably not that smart … not that rational, ” since most people were going to get the virus anyway. At the time, the notion of total containment was rightly considered unworkable. The more reasonable path toward restoring normalcy was to achieve herd immunity through vaccination and natural immunity.

But only a few short weeks after the 60 Minutes interview, Fauci and his chief enabler, former President Donald Trump, suddenly reversed course. On April 3, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to recommend that people wear the very same masks that Fauci had derided as useless only weeks before. The reason for the sudden reverse was revealing in the extreme.

"Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned about the public health community,” Fauci said at the time, “and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in harm's way, take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."

Fauci’s admission that he’d intentionally lied about the effectiveness of masking out of concern for a perceived shortage crisis foreshadowed future instances in which he felt it was within his right to manipulate the public for ostensibly noble purposes. Thanks to a pliable news media and an incompetent boss in the Oval Office, the preposterous idea that masks were helpful to medical professionals but not the public drew little scrutiny. He was thus allowed to proceed as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the president until the end of 2022.

In that time, Fauci intentionally misled the public on a score of other fronts. His efforts to suppress the lab leak theory of COVID’s origins (in a likely attempt to cover himself), in which Fauci commissioned and edited the “Proximal Origin” research paper and then had the audacity to cite it in a press conference as though it were independent evidence, would make a Soviet commissar proud. And his proclamation in 2021 that vaccinated people would become a “dead end” for the virus, making it “extremely unlikely” that they could transmit the disease, convinced many to receive the highly experimental vaccine under false pretenses. Again and again, Fauci misled the public through a sour mixture of self-serving dishonesty and good old-fashioned incompetence.

As such, it should surprise no one that the lab leak theory is now the explanation favored by the FBI and the Department of Energy’s elite “Z Division.” Nor that vaccinations did not prevent transmission of the virus — a fact the CDC now admits. Nor that Fauci’s insistence on school closures ( which he later falsely denied ), despite the lack of evidence that school children were at risk of severe COVID complications, resulted in learning loss that rocked a generation and will take many years to fully comprehend. Nor that a recent Cochrane study, which the National Institutes of Health describes as the “gold standard for meta-analytic review,” found that masking was as useless as Fauci had initially claimed.

For years, the legacy news media has blamed the erosion of trust people have in their institutions on “right-wing conspiracy theorists.” But no one has done more to erode public trust in government, nor embolden the looniest loons from the land of “Q," than the patron saint of quackery himself: Fauci, or as he likes to be called, “The Science.”

Late last week, the retired Fauci made headlines when he told CNN’s Michael Smerconish that he was “concerned that people will not abide” by new mask mandates. But who could possibly care what this man has to say on the matter? How has he not already been laughed off into obscurity? Only a fool would take his word for anything.

I did once. But that was long ago.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, The Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.