The National Institutes of Health’s inspector general issued a "damning" report of the team led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, which funded research into coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.

The agency watchdog on Wednesday said that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases made egregious errors in its oversight of the risky bat research it financed at the EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit group at the center of widespread speculation that COVID-19 could have leaked into the human population due to a lab leak in Wuhan.

The investigators found that EcoHealth was two years late reporting to Fauci’s subagency that its lab-made coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were far more infectious than their natural counterparts. The report also found that the NIH did not refer the findings to an independent government panel designed to oversee so-called gain-of-function research.

"It’s a damning indictment of NIH," Georgetown University professor and White House health security adviser Lawrence O. Gostin told the New York Times. "This report really is the first truly independent and nonpartisan review of NIH procedures with research on enhanced pathogens, and it shows grave errors in following NIH’s own rules and also in just a diligent monitoring and oversight that the public would expect."