The National Institutes of Health admitted Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance broke its reporting rules when conducting bat coronavirus research, with critics immediately contending this means the Wuhan lab collaborator had indeed been conducting gain-of-function research and NIH lied about it.

NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak said in a Wednesday letter that EcoHealth provided a five-year progress report on bat coronavirus research conducted under an NIH grant, and “the limited experiment described in the final progress report” was “testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”