Despite Dr. Fauci telling Congress 'the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,' NIH's Dr. Tabak later testified that the NIH was in fact funding such research through a grant to EcoHealth Alliance. The Intercept obtained documents confirming the research met the US government's own definition of gain-of-function research of concern.
“The US government funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab through the EcoHealth Alliance, and officials are lying about it.”
What they said vs. what the evidence shows
“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
— Dr. Anthony Fauci · May 2021
SourceFrom “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
When Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before Congress in May 2021, he offered a categorical denial. The NIH, he stated under oath, "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." The claim seemed settled. The nation's top infectious disease official had spoken, and his words carried the weight of his position.
But the record tells a more complicated story.
Nearly a year later, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak sent a letter to Congress that walked back this position. Yes, the NIH had been funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Yes, the funding had flowed through a grant to EcoHealth Alliance. And yes, according to Tabak's own admission, that research appeared to meet the U.S. government's definition of gain-of-function research of concern—the very type of work that Fauci had just denied the agency was supporting.
The shift wasn't announced with fanfare. There was no press conference. For many Americans following the COVID-19 origin debate, the reversal went largely unnoticed, buried beneath layers of procedural language and bureaucratic protocol.
What changed wasn't the facts themselves. What changed was what the government was willing to acknowledge about those facts. The Intercept's investigation, which obtained internal NIH documents and grant applications, showed that EcoHealth Alliance had indeed conducted gain-of-function research using NIH money at the Wuhan lab. The research involved manipulating coronaviruses to study how they might jump between species—precisely the kind of work that regulatory frameworks exist to oversee and restrict.
The documents were specific. They outlined the research plan, the objectives, and the funding amounts. They showed that scientists involved understood they were working with dangerous pathogens and novel methodologies. By the government's own written standards, what they were describing constituted gain-of-function research of concern.
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Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
None of this proves what many believed about COVID-19's origins. The question of whether the pandemic began in a lab or jumped naturally from animals to humans remains contested and genuinely difficult to resolve. But this documentation does establish something narrower and more concrete: a federal agency funded work that matched its own definition of concerning gain-of-function research, and a senior government official initially testified that this had not happened.
The gap between those two facts matters. It matters because public health decisions depend on public trust, and trust is built on honest accounting, not retroactive corrections delivered in technical letters. It matters because the public was asked to accept the government's word on a sensitive question—where a pandemic began—while that same government was not being fully forthright about its own role in supporting related research.
This isn't primarily a story about scientists or science itself. It's a story about institutional accountability and the difficulty of obtaining complete information from institutions that have strong incentives to control how they're perceived. When the facts eventually emerge—sometimes through court documents, sometimes through reporting, sometimes through reluctant admissions—it reshapes not just our understanding of what happened, but our willingness to believe official accounts in the future.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.4% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~500Large op
Secret kept
2.2 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
