Below is an article from New York Post:
NIH admits US funded gain-of-function in Wuhan - despite Fauci’s denials
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In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance - the New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab - for not being transparent about the work it was doing.NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
The lab mice infected with the modified virus “became sicker” than those that were given the unmodified virus, according to Tabak.
“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” Tabak said.
Gain-of-function research refers to viruses being taken from animals before they are genetically altered in a lab to make them more transmissible to humans.
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He insisted the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant could not have become COVID-19 because the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant.”
As recently as last month, Fauci was accused of lying about gain-of-function research after documents, obtained by the Intercept, detailed grants given to EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus studies.That grant proposal detailed in the trove of documents was for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” which involved screening thousands of bat samples, as well as people who worked with live animals, for novel coronaviruses.
The $3.1 million grant was awarded for a five-year period between 2014 and 2019. After the funding was renewed in 2019, it was suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020.
The grant directed $599,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research.
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So, they didn't mean to do gain-of-function research but they did it accidentally? How convenient. They modified a virus and tested if it's transmissible to humans. This modified bat virus might not be the COVID-19, but who knows how many kinds of virus are there in the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
Below is the letter from NIH's principal deputy director to Rep. James Comer, featured in the above article.
Also, you can check the interim research performance progress report of "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence" project, proposed by the EcoHealth Alliance:
https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Year-5-EHAv.pdf