Dr. Anthony Fauci attends an event with First Lady Jill Biden in Washington, Dec. 9.

Photo: saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

About the last thing America needs is a 9/11-style commission on Covid, as some in Congress are pushing. No giant amount of classified information needs to be examined by an appointed few to help us prepare for next outbreak. On the contrary, unending research and lesson-drawing is already under way world-wide. The next pandemic will bring both similarities and differences from the last one, and it will behoove us to have lots of global research to pick and choose the relevant lessons from.

An exception? Domestic soul-searching might pay off on the question of political communication.

Here a typically idiotic Twitter spat this week between Elon Musk and John Brennan, the former CIA chief, can get us started. Mr. Musk offered a silly and irresponsible remark, which is Twitter’s stock in trade, tweeting, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

Mr. Brennan, a veteran of the Obama administration, took exception and, grandpa-style, declared Dr. Anthony Fauci a “national hero” while pronouncing Mr. Musk an upstart whippersnapper grown too big for his britches.

I paraphrase, of course.

In fact, Dr. Fauci may face legal trouble if he’s found to have suppressed information about unsafe research the U.S. government was funding at the Wuhan lab. But otherwise he could best serve now by speaking frankly about why certain public statements during the pandemic were less concerned with truth than with influencing public behavior.

Dr. Fauci himself misled more than once on masks, first to preserve mask supply for hospital staff, then to encourage public takeup of masks by exaggerating their ability to spare you from catching Covid (they work best to stop you from spreading it).

For longer than was appropriate, he encouraged Americans to believe vaccination wouldn’t just protect them from severe illness, but stop them from getting and spreading the virus.

He never went out of his way to let young people know that, because they were at least risk from severe illness, they had the least to gain from vaccination.

He and others were terse at best in letting Americans know the ludicrously emphasized “confirmed case” count made Covid seem both rarer and more deadly than it was.

More generally, he and other officials seemed eager to abet the censorious segment of the public to berate others about masks, vaccinations and lockdowns beyond their merits.

At times he also seemed to wave off responsibility for the downside of his advice aimed at reducing absolutely the number of cases, saying it was somebody else’s job to consider the trade-offs in lost employment, depression, missed schooling, suicide.

And not for Dr. Fauci or any other official was the advice advertised from day one on the CDC website (until it mysteriously disappeared): “In the coming months, most of the U.S. population will be exposed to this virus.”

At worst, he and others thought it wouldn’t be good for their personal brands to be seen delivering this unwelcome but realistic news to the American people.

In Mr. Brennan’s suggestion Dr. Fauci did his best, a fair conclusion from a grown-up perspective if we understand doing his best to mean making judicious decisions about when to mislead.

Consistently misunderstood, especially by the relentless Trump critic Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, officials were under a de facto mandate to avoid panic.

The mayor of New York, the governor of California, Dr. Fauci and CDC’s Dr.

Nancy Messonnier all declared that Covid was nothing to worry about, by which they really meant don’t worry yet. Their quotes now seem indefensibly glib. But under the textbook plan of “flatten the curve” the goal was to slow the spread only as needed to ease the burden on hospitals. Virtually any politician who paid attention to briefings understood job one to be playing down the new virus until it was time to institute specific measures.

Now this seems a mistake, at least a tad too manipulative. Two female leaders—Germany’s Angela Merkel and New Jersey’s state health commissioner, Judith Persichilli —were comparatively frank from the earliest days about how the pandemic would develop: The virus would become endemic. All would be exposed.

Ms. Persichilli in particular said she expected to get Covid and so should you. Here may be the one lesson yet to be learned. A wider dose of such realism would have helped Americans make better, more rational choices about protecting the most vulnerable, worrying less about the young and healthy, while having confidence that most of us would survive and society would adapt just fine to a new respiratory virus, as it had in the past.