Despite repeated denials that any American taxpayer money funded gain-of-function research for months, the National Institutes of Health is now admitting that a “limited experiment” was conducted. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) – who grilled Dr. Anthony Fauci about gain-of-function research multiple times – took a victory lap following the admission by the NIH.

Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak – the principal deputy director of the NIH and the deputy ethics counselor of the agency – issued a letter admitting that his health agency funded a “limited experiment” 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 letter – which was addressed to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform – explained that the “research project conducted during the 2018-19 grant period used bat coronavirus genome sequences that already exist in nature.”