Letters made public between the NIH and a US politician reveal that, despite claims made that the viruses that (were ADMITTED) to have come out of the research were too distant from SARS CoV2 to have been directly related to SARS CoV2, the fact remains that the work did/does produce more dangerous variants of the viruses than existed prior to the work being carried out. This is the exact definition of the 'gain of function' research that has been made illegal and which those involved are using every kind of mental gymnastics possible to distance themselves from.

Your claim above (which is just a repeat of the tweeted claim) is factually false. If you create a new virus and it turns out unexpectedly to be more dangerous than the original one, it does not mean you are doing "gain of function" research. It just means that the result was you created a more transmissible virus. Under your expansive definition, any research that modifies a virus is potentially gain-of-function research that would be illegal. The letter is clear on the point that the behavior of the resulting virus in this case was not intended/expected.

You also persist in the false claim made by Ebright that it was a case of working with an “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)” when the definition of such viruses is limited to human transmissible viruses. You can bitch all you want about experimentation with viruses and argue that we should just leave them alone entirely, but you can't change a pre-defined scientific term just to suit your narrative, then use that as a claim that the NIH is violating its own rules.