Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), edited a research paper by the group that worked with a high-profile lab in Wuhan, China, to study dangerous bat viruses while pushing back on concerns that the facility could be the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper, titled "Nipah virus dynamics in bats and implications for spillover to humans," was funded by eight federal programs, half of which were from the NIAID that Fauci will lead until December.

Members of the nonprofit research group EcoHealth Alliance, which became a conduit for the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct risky bat research using U.S. taxpayer dollars, make up over half of the roughly two dozen authors on the paper.

Fauci edited the paper in 2020 after receiving it for review that Jan. 8, two weeks before COVID-19 brought Wuhan to a complete lockdown. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, better known as PNAS, approved it in September 2020 and published it two months later.

The extent of Fauci's input into the paper is unclear. As a public servant for four decades, Fauci has edited scientific papers, notably on the subject of HIV. But his editorial role, given the group's history of ties with the Wuhan lab and the funding it received from his agency, nonetheless raised eyebrows among critics.