NIH admits Fauci lied about funding Wuhan gain-of-function experiments

Two years after Wuhan hosted the 2019 Military World Games, determined to be one of the planet’s first superspreader events of the novel coronavirus pandemic, a top official at the National Institutes of Health has conceded that the agency did indeed fund highly dangerous gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In a letter to Kentucky Republican James Comer, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Lawrence A. Tabak of the NIH admitted that “out of an abundance of caution,” and, of course, after two years of conspicuous indignant behavior that anyone would consider the lab-leak hypothesis, the nation’s top medical research agency conducted an additional review of how the funds authorized by Dr. Anthony Fauci and friends were used by EcoHealth Alliance, the New York City-based nonprofit organization headed by frequent WIV collaborator Peter Daszak.

The bulk of Tabak’s letter is spent minimizing the culpability of the NIH, but the admission is no less gratifying.

Per the letter, EcoHealth did indeed “fail to report” findings required by the terms of the NIH grant. More crucially, the gain-of-function experiments in question were conducted at the WIV. Tabak ultimately says that Daszak’s EcoHealth has just five days to respond to the infraction. Daszak was last seen bullying into silence anyone who considered this possibility.

NIH has, until now, acquiesced to Fauci’s pearl-clutching outrage at the idea that his department carved out exceptions from the Obama-era ban of gain-of-function research to fund EcoHealth. Not even a year ago, tried and true virologists such as Robert Redfield, President Donald Trump’s head of the CDC, were smeared as Sinophobic bigots for entertaining the lab leak hypothesis, let alone the notion that Fauci and his friends actually funded the sort of experiments that probably brought about the virus’s creation.