Coronavirus: Lab Leak Part 20 - Was Dr. Fauci Lying about Funding Gain-of-Function Research?

I have no clue who is right or who is wrong or if this is a big deal or not, but since I've been posting on the lab leak hypothesis, an interested piece of information came out recently on Zerohedge (Oct 22) reports:

In a letter addressed to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak cites a "limited experiment" to determine whether "spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model." According to the letter, humanized mice infected with the modified bat virus "became sicker" than those exposed to an unmodified version of the same bat coronavirus.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Examiner that a new letter in which the NIH conceded that the group run by Peter Daszak violated its rules when conducting bat coronavirus research is a "bombshell" admission because it “corrects the untruthful assertions” by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and his boss, NIH Director Francis Collins, both of whom claim the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.

On ABC's This Week (Oct 24), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci responds:

But one of the things that gets mixed up in this, George, and it really needs to be made clear to the American public. There’s all of this concern about what's gain of function or what's not, with the implication that that research led to SARS-CoV-2, and COVID-19, which, George, unequivocally anything that knows anything about viral biology and phylogeny of viruses know that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that were worked on to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2.

So Dr. Fauci is convinced that this research had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2. Yet, what else was going on over there? Will evidence start to come out that shows gain of function research that could have resulted in the virus?