Why did Fauci give US taxpayer funding to a Chinese lab?

 Did, or did not, the Wuhan lab in China create the corona virus?  Who knows?  Why did Fauci approve giving US funding to a Chinese lab?  If there was something that we really needed to know, we should have funded and American lab, on American soil, staffed by Americans, to do the work.  That way we get the results, we can check them, retry anything that seems doubtful, and we have full access to the experimental results.  

   The Chinese have clammed up about just what went on at that Wuhan lab.  We funded them but we don't get any results.  Money down the drain.  

I suspect that the funding went to China, because the work was "gain of function" research, a very dangerous procedure that had been banned by the Obama administration.  Fauci wanted for some reason to do some gain of function work, so he sent the work and the money to China which had not banned gain of function research.

Gain of function research amounts to fiddling with the infectious agent, most likely a virus, to make it more infectious.  There is no good reason to do that sort of thing.