Your humble correspondent hoped to have this retrospective completed by the start of the New Year, but a tussle with omicron intervened.  Nevertheless, it still seems worthwhile to pause and remember the worst COVID offenders of 2021.

As we do so, questions inevitably arise.  When will these wrongdoers be held accountable for the death and destruction they have wrought on our world?  What should their punishments be?  How should they be made examples of — cautionary tales to dissuade those who might plot similar evils in the future?

Without further ado, here are our Top 10 COVID-19 Villains of 2021.

10. Sonny and Fredo Cuomo (tie).  Of the two fatally flawed Cuomo boys, Andrew is the hotheaded, bullying, enemy-collecting former Don, while Chris is the hapless beta who got dropped on his head or something.  Before Andrew paid the ultimate price for his sexual harassment escapades, he managed to whack thousands of innocent yet expendable nursing home nonnas.  Chris ran interference for his big brother on CNN, then briefly acted as his damage-control consigliere until he got the kiss of death himself, leaving the Cuomo family in desperate need of a Michael.

9. Randi Weingarten.  The Jimmy Hoffa of "educators," Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers, the most powerful teachers' union in the United States.  More than any other single individual, Weingarten spearheaded the prolonged and utterly unnecessary school closures that shattered the lives of millions of children throughout the COVID-19 era.  Now she attempts to gaslight the public about her central role in that titanic injustice, while still pushing for school closures during omicron.  That's the kind of feral, black-hearted goblin that makes Grendel's mother look like Donna Reed.

8. Kathy Hochul.  When New York's current governor replaced the execrable Andrew Cuomo, citizens thought better days must lie ahead.  Instead, in a classic "hold my beer" moment, this unknown quantity simply changed the motto above the governor's office from "GRABBIN' FANNIES AND KILLIN' GRANNIES" to "VAX OR DIE."

With her creepy-as-all-get-out Vaxed necklace, her remarkable resemblance to Margaret Hamilton, and her demonic lust to oppress the Oompa Loompas formerly known as New Yorkers, Hochul has forever claimed the title of the "Wicked Witch of Western New York."  Giving this devil her due, Hochul is a bit of a phenomenon: a truly dangerous harpy who apparently sprang fully formed out of the primordial ooze that is local New York Democrat party politics.

7. Rochelle Walensky.  To some, Dr. Hot Mess may seem to have a bit too much Lucy and Ethel in her to make this exclusive list.  Hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer, Walensky (Biden's choice for CDC head) is a bit of a dark horse, but hear us out.

Walensky so brazenly seeks to abuse power that she attempted to singlehandedly prolong the federal eviction moratorium on public health grounds — giving Americans a shot across the bow about how woke Big Medicine feels about all our civil rights.  She has also driven the CDC's remaining credibility off a cliff with 1) the laughably bad in-house studies she has used to back her recommendations, 2) the email revelations that she takes policy orders from Weingarten's teachers' unions, and 3) her utterly incoherent change-with-the-wind "guidance."

Machiavelli warned against assuming malice when incompetence explains abuse of power, but Walensky proves it's a false choice when the person in question is so generously blessed with both.  Bonus points for coming so late to the game, knowing exactly the evil she was signing up for, and diving in headfirst.

6. Francis Collins.  The human embodiment of hypocrisy, Collins presents himself as Mister Rogers while behaving like Dr. Evil.  The ultimate enabler, front, and (relatively) silent partner to Anthony Fauci for the past dozen years, Collins retired as NIH director after being caught lying to Congress about the gain of function research his NIH funded at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which, as everyone from Rand Paul to Jon Stewart knows, was the source of this whole disaster.

Recently FOIAed emails reveal that Collins, notwithstanding his fatuously gentle, avuncular public persona, demanded a "quick and devastating published takedown" of the three "fringe epidemiologists" (from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford!) who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration.  How dare such insolent (if truly expert) commoners attempt to avert the immense, worldwide collateral damage that Lords Collins, Fauci, and Co. have decreed to befall us!

When the final analysis is made about the origins of COVID-19 and the harms deliberately caused by the official response to it, Collins's sins will closely shadow Fauci's.  In one respect, though, Fake Francis stands alone: without question, he is the most nauseatingly disingenuous personality on this list.  Just watch his self-serving bastardization of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" to see this human gag reflex's repulsive personality in full flower.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services via YouTube.  Click if you dare.

5. Albert Bourla.  Ever wonder why the push for mass vaccination with mRNA vaccines makes you feel like one head in a herd of cattle during a brucellosis outbreak?  Well, wonder no more.  That's right, ladies and gentlemen: the CEO of the world's largest and most rapacious pharmaceutical company is a veterinarian.  But there's no All Creatures Great and Small vibe coming from this guy; it's all human beings as livestock, all the time.

Bourla reportedly made 21 million dollars in salary alone from Pfizer in 2020, while publicly calling all those who questioned the universal, forced, and repeated administration of his leaky, toxic, rapidly obsolescing vaccines "murderers."  Project much?  The amoral poster child for Big Pharma and its evil spawn, Big Vax.

4. Mark Zuckerberg.  He's the smarmy, impudent personification of social media censorship, population-level thought control, and exploitation of the masses.  Since Day One, Facebook has been the epicenter of suppression and silencing of all dissent from the lockdown/no early treatment/vaccines forever COVID-19 narrative.

Zuckerberg's foundation — in concert with J&J's — even funded the putrid Atlantic hit piece on Dr. Robert Malone.  You can almost see Zuck rubbing his hands together with perverse pride, knowing he has finally made the jump from mere arrogant social media über-jerk (à la Jack Dorsey) to a genuine Silicon Valley force for worldwide evil, like...

3. Bill Gates.  The éminence grise behind the whole disaster, and damn proud of it.  Gates has wielded the obscene wealth of his Foundation as a cudgel, hijacking effective control of the World Health Organization's policy and messaging.

Furthermore, he partnered with Anthony Fauci to promote and produce the perverse fear-mongering infectious disease war games such as MARS 2017, SPARS 2017, and Clade X.  His goal: To condition government agencies, the legacy media, and the medical establishment to the inevitability of just this sort of pandemic, and the need for the totalitarian measures and forced vaccination programs that have since come to pass.  Pure evil.

2. Xi Jinping.  As the pandemic began in his own country, Dear Leader responded by 1) brutally locking down his own people, 2) systematically lying to the rest of the world, and 3) ensuring the spread of the virus worldwide.  Two years later, he's locking his people down again to ensure that his "genocide Olympics" won't be impacted.

Xi might have been ranked first but for two setbacks.  First, he looks too much like Winnie the Pooh.  Second, Xi is a communist dictator, after all.  He's supposed to be evil.

1. Anthony Fauci.  The linchpin of the entire COVID-19 disaster, Lil' Tony makes Dr. Strangelove seem like Marcus Welby, M.D.  Fauci has been a central antagonist at every step of this global catastrophe, from funding its origins in Wuhan to the allowance of its worldwide spread to the systematic suppression of existing treatments to all the repressive policies to the takeover of the medical profession by Big Vax to the effective revocation of the Bill of Rights by the Deep State.

But don't take our word for it.  Read RFK Jr.'s The Real Anthony Fauci, and ask yourself this question: what fate does this individual deserve if just one-tenth of that book is true?  In our humble opinion, Fauci will be remembered as the greatest criminal against humanity since Pol Pot, and the most notorious traitor in the U.S. federal government since Alger Hiss.

Honorable mention: J. Biden, J. Dorsey, B. Johnson, R. Klain, S. Morrison, G. Newsom, the Scarf Lady, and the Bat Lady.

There you have it, folks: our top 10 COVID-19 villains of 2021!  Did we forget your favorite?  Please let us know in the comments below.

Happy 2022!