A letter was sent to Republican Representative James Comer from Lawrence A. Tabak of the National Institute of Health (NIH) confirming what many Republicans have concluded about the novel coronavirus pandemic, but have been denied by Fauci and others in the Biden administration.

The letter, sent Wednesday by the top NIH official, admits U.S. taxpayers did indeed fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. “In keeping with Fauci’s refusal to use ‘gain-of-function,’ Tabak avoids the term, though the work he described matches its commonplace definition precisely,” writes National Review.

Additionally, the letter confirmed the U.S. non-profit EcoHealth Alliance that funneled money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not transparent about its work. Tabak writes about a “limited experiment” that was conducted to test if “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 “became sicker” than those infected with the unmodified bat virus.

EcoHealth had filed a “previously unpublished” grant proposal with the NIAID. The proposal was obtained by The Intercept and exposed that $599,000 of the total grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was for research figuring out how to make viruses more dangerous and/or infectious.

Additionally, Tabak reveals EcoHealth failed to comply with its reporting responsibilities under the grant, therefore now has five days to submit to NIH “any and all unpublished data” relating to the project for compliance purposes.

National Review writes “Dr. Richard Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, had previously rebutted Fauci’s claim that the NIH ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV]’ as ‘demonstrably false.”

“Ebright told National Review that the NIH-financed work at the WIV ‘epitomizes’ the definition of gain-of-function research, which deals with ‘enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)’ or those pathogens ‘resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.”