Therefore it should have been a choice, not a mandate.

Vaccines certainly made a difference—in that they made it much less likely that elderly, obese, and health-compromised Americans would suffer severe disease and death from COVID-19. There's not much evidence that the other mitigation efforts—mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing—had a discernible impact on deaths.

That should be Fauci's legacy. He pushed the nation's leaders to implement heavy-handed social controls aimed at reducing the death toll of COVID-19, and those authoritarian restrictions on personal freedom accomplished very little.

Ironic that given his support for violating individual rights protected by the Constitution, he would hide behind the Fifth Amendment when elected officials attempted to discern the truth.