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Jack Gruber-USA TODAY
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It’s about time!
At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asked by Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) whether an NIH grant to the Manhattan-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance supported the gain-of-function experiments, Tabak said, “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”
The response comes after more than four years of evasions from federal public health officials — including Tabak and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci — about the controversial research that modifies viruses to make them more infectious.