What did Dr. Fauci know, and when did he know it?

Other emails from that same day reveal Fauci was perhaps concerned that the gain-of-function research experiments in Wuhan could potentially be tied back to funding from his employer, the U.S. taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health. Fauci circulated a paper with his colleagues about gain-of-function research into bat coronaviruses authored by none other than Dr. Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist known for conducting such research. In public, however, Fauci repeatedly dismissed concerns that COVID-19 was man-made, despite being warned early on that COVID-19 may have been engineered. If Fauci suspected in early February that COVID-19 could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, why did he repeatedly downplay that possibility and push the narrative that it came from a wet market? Could it be because the Wuhan Institute of Virology received $600,000 of funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the very organization Fauci runs?