“The first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market,” Fauci wrote of the wet market outbreak that began in late December 2019. Paul contrasted Fauci’s early private doubts about the Wuhan wet market being the pandemic’s origin with his repeated emphasis on wet markets in press interviews. He championed their work when they identified the wet market as the virus’s origin. Papers in the scientific literature and grant proposals show that the Wuhan lab specialized in manipulating novel coronaviruses. Grant documents from EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that directed National Institutes of Health money to the Wuhan lab, also describe experiments on engineered novel coronaviruses.