Republicans say a letter from a National Institutes of Health official is an admission that the agency funded so-called gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in China, with some falsely linking the work to the pandemic coronavirus. But the research, which the NIH maintains is not gain-of-function, could not have led to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Claim: National Institutes of Health Director Anthony Fauci helped fund gain of function research at a facility in Wuhan, China, and that research ultimately led to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rating: Unproven

Documents released yesterday by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appear to contradict previous claims by the EcoHealth Alliance regarding the subject of experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, raising further questions over whether U.S. government funding contributed to so-called “gain-of-function” research.

In a letter to Representative James Comer, Ranking Member on the Oversight and Reform Committee, the NIH provided additional information and documents regarding NIH’s much-scrutinized grant to EcoHealth Alliance.

It’s another Fauci flub.

The National Institutes of Health has stunningly admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened.

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.

The National Institutes of Health said on Wednesday that a nonprofit group under fire from some Congressional Republicans for its research collaborations in China had failed to promptly report findings from studies on how well bat coronaviruses grow in mice.

A top NIH official admitted in a Wednesday letter that U.S. taxpayers funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and revealed that EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. non-profit that funneled NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was not transparent about the work it was doing.

A World Health Organization (WHO) collaborator, who reviewed a coronavirus research grant application unearthed last month, confirmed that the language of the documents suggests American and Chinese scientists planned to collaborate on the creation of a new coronavirus not found in nature.

A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses.

U.S. and Chinese researchers funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) created viruses in a Wuhan lab that exhibited over 10,000 times higher viral load in humanized mice than the natural virus they were based on, according to an infectious disease professor citing documents recently released by the agency.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has denied funding studies that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans after it was accused of doing so following the release of research proposals.

The documents were obtained and released by The Intercept on Tuesday after it launched an FOIA lawsuit.