Whether or not he approved a particular grant personally eight years ago, it's reasonable for him not to recall. Or, at least, it would be reasonable other than that, of course, he's known for ages that he was going to be asked about this specific thing and, as counsel points out many times in his objections, Fauci prepared heavily for the deposition. It would be very reasonable for him to have read up on the grants he knew he was going to be asked about to be able to recall basic facts about them.

But even then, most of the "do not recall" responses really aren't the damaging parts of the deposition.

I did like the part where Fauci was handed an email he had written where he discussed a paper and described it as a gain-of-function paper [shortly after having testified that nobody used the terminology "gain-of-function" anymore, since it was overbroad and vague], and he was asked whether, in this email, he had referred to the paper as a gain-of-function paper or not (with the text of his email literally in his hands) and his counsel objects on the grounds that it was a "mischaracterization" to assume that, because the email was written by Fauci, that it contained his words.

That actually ends up being one of the more damaging parts of the testimony -- not because it's some big admission that this study was doing gain-of-function -- everybody knows that -- but because Fauci has repeatedly testified that NIAID was not funding any coronavirus-related gain-of-function studies. If Fauci had not described the study using the phrase "gain-of-function", his argument that "gain-of-function is broad and mostly-meaningless" might possibly have carried the day -- he testified that way because that's what he was asked about, but maybe in his mind that phrase meant something else. But then there's the email where he talks specifically about the gain-of-function study which he knows (at the time he wrote the email about it) was NIAID-funded. So, if he ever testified [after writing that email] that NIAID did not fund any gain-of-function studies on coronaviruses, well... that would be perjury.

Still, relatively unlikely perjury charges will be made to stick (or even seriously attempted) -- Bannon remains the only person in basically forever to be actually prosecuted for lying to Congress, and unless Covid gets back to a state where the government is trying to reintroduce restrictions/mandates, I don't foresee anybody spending the political capital to try that case.

And all of that presupposes that that portion of the deposition is even admitted as evidence. It may or may not be -- there were, after all, standing objections. And while objecting to assuming that the sender of an email was its author is a bit specious, some of the other objections might not be as unreasonable.

It'll be really interesting tomorrow to see how much tech and media end up suppressing this story too.

Presumably, just like with the story this is all about, they'll just ban all mention of it and delete everybody's accounts because of "safety" or something.

I'm actively watching a variety of mainstream press to see if any of them cover the story, but honestly I doubt they will, other than maybe to have an AP fact check that says that the whole thing is false and that Elon made it all up.

edit: here's dang himself on how the dupe detector ignores things that haven't had their chance in the sun yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33824482

Every effort will be taken to suppress this story, just like the story it's talking about. (And remember that dang has before admitted to manually editing scores and reordering the front page to suit his preferences for what the community talk about)

None of the threads are even in the top 500 posts, despite the score being much higher than plenty of other posts which have made it. (Most of the things on the 15th page are like 5 points in 12 hours)

edit: Here is a recent comment from dang himself where he talks about a moderator altering the score of a post downward because it wasn't the kind of content that they wanted to be popular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698592

edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang: I posted the one because I was not being believed. Finding a bunch of them was too much work. You may not "make a secret" of it, but clearly lots of people don't know that the frontpage is actually what the moderators want folks to talk about, not what actually gets the upvotes. Oh, and reread your comment to me. Your comment uses exactly the style and tone for which you routinely chastise folks. You're doing a really good job, actually, of making my point for me.

In other areas, people were absurdly more wealthy in 2016 than in 1916 -- in terms of the quality of food, transportation, healthcare, nearly all household goods, services of most kind except domestic/household staff, and of course all the technology that didn't exist at all then.

Think about it this way: the planet is the same planet, but an hour of work at an average job should on average buy you an hour's worth of stuff-made-by-labor (of average skill/value). As human productivity grew due to better equipment, better materials, better science, and more efficient operations, the amount of stuff an average hour of work produces is way higher -- and thus the average worker can afford more/better stuff for the same amount of time worked.

Some work got way more productive, some got a little more productive, and a few things (like domestic help) are exactly the same level of productivity as before. And so some things, we have absurdly cheaper or better things, but others have gotten slightly more expensive instead.