Dr. Fauci has now infamously denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research at the WIV, but that was a lie by omission. In 2015, researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the WIV teamed up to conduct a gain-of-function study funded largely by U.S. taxpayers. Only the Americans were funded by NIH, but the WIV received a sub-grant from USAID. Flush with American funding, what exactly did they do? The Chinese researchers inserted a key genetic component of a bat coronavirus called a spike protein into the backbone of an artificial mouse version of SARS-CoV-1. The result was a pathogen found nowhere in nature, one that could "cause robust infection" in human cells. The WIV provided the spike protein sequences for this chimeric creation. The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is also what makes that virus so infectious to humans. Fauci is exploiting his position in government -- and his ill-deserved positive reputation in the liberal media -- to willfully misrepresent what is meant by a lab leak, conflating it with a biological weapons program (which is just one possible motive for gain-of-function research in Wuhan). That, or he's showing his age.