NIH official ADMITS US tax dollars funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan lab

A senior National Institute of Health official admitted to Congress that US taxpayers paid for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in months leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) asked NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak, "Did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?” 

Tabak answered, “It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak said. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.” 

The response from the top NIH official comes after years of the organization dodging the question from government officials in similar hearings that have pressed the NIH over the question.  

Tabak then stated that “this is research, the generic term [gain-of-function], is research that goes on in many, many labs around the country. It is not regulated. And the reason it’s not regulated is it poses no threat or harm to anybody.” 

Then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci denied the claim many times that any gain-of-function research was funded with taxpayer dollars. In an October 2021 letter to Congress, Tabak had said that the NIH paid for a "limited experiment" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This was designed to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” 

This raised many questions as to if the letter conflicted with the repeated denials of Fauci, who has been pressed by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on the topic many times. In May 2021, when Paul asked Fauci about the topic, the health official responded, "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," according to the New York Post.