Though they represent day and night, these two scientists remind us that you don’t always end a war with the general you start with. Two years into this fight, we need a new chief medical officer. I say this not because I lack faith in Fauci — I don’t — but because he has ceased to be as effective as we need him to be in the information battle against covid-19. Now 80, he attracts only a portion of the nation he once did and, I fear, everyone is, to be blunt, a little sick of him.

Many sensible folks doubtless share my nostalgia for the good old days when science and reason appeared to lead the conversation. Desperate for a solution to covid, we tuned in to hear the latest advice from the best scientists. The stalwart Fauci was the wise Oracle of Delphi to then-President Donald Trump’s babbling brook about household bleach as an injectable, anti-viral agent — or whatever Trump had divined in the moments just before showtime.

Maybe it’s my imagination, but Fauci appears less confident of late, perhaps weary of his own voice and exhausted by two years of on-camera appearances. He appears physically smaller somehow, as though reduced by overexposure. He has enemies on the right, of course, but also on the left; consider anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s characterization of Fauci in his recent book as wielding “power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.”