@CB
way it does is anybody's guess.

Funding: First round could've been a legitimate interest, to the extent that the US ever has any such, in trying to understand all the myriad bat virii and how to contain them or prevent their spread and or prevent them from infecting humans.

Phase 2, assuming it happened could be the same. Gain of function research is little more than an unconfirmed rumor. The person in the piece linked here says she knew of none, ever, at Wuhan. A different source a while back ( http://dilyana.bg/project-g-2101-pentagon-biolab-discovered-mers-and-sar... ) noted that the US was running both civil and military projects in multiple labs, mostly in former SSRs and said in part:

Peter Daszak, president of Eco Health Alliance, told Democracy Now that he had collected bat samples with Chinese colleagues but the Wuhan laboratory did not house the culture of bat viruses but rather their genetic sequencing. If the viruses were not stored in the Wuhan lab in China, then where were they transported and stored?

This is not the only US-funded project under which Eco Health Alliance collected bats and coronaviruses in China. The US scientists studied bats in Eastern Asia (mainly China) and Africa from 2009 to 2019 under the $200 million USAID Predict program whose primary objective was to exactly predict pandemics.

(my emphasis)

In 2016 Eco Health Alliance, US scientists and USAID launched the The Global Virome Project. The ambitious project was estimated to cost at least $1.6 billion for 10 years. Its main objective is to identify emerging diseases lurking in the wild that could spread to humans and become pandemic.

also my emphasis

be well and have a good one

Despite the availability of the German test kit made public on January 13 the first American tests were considerably delayed:

WIKI
...
By February 27, fewer than 4,000 tests had been conducted in the U.S.[10] Although academic laboratories and hospitals had developed their own tests, they were not allowed to use them until February 29, when the FDA issued approvals for them and private companies.[10][11]

From February 25, a group of researchers from the Seattle Flu Study defied federal and state officials to conduct their own tests, using samples already collected from flu study subjects who had not given permission for SARS-CoV-2 testing. They quickly found a teenager infected with SARS-CoV-2 of unknown origin, newly indicating that an outbreak had already been occurring in Washington for the past six weeks. State regulators stopped these researchers' testing on March 2, although the testing later resumed through the creation of the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network.

Due to lack of timely testing, we have little to no information when COVID-19 first started circulating in the US.

Another question is why was the Wuhan lab given American research funding in the first place, especially for gain of function research?

Why Would the US Have Funded the Controversial Wuhan Lab?
...
According to Newsweek, funding for the WIV occurred in two phases. The first took place from 2014 to 2019, through a $3.7 million project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses. This work was largely led by Dr. Zhengli Shi, known to many as “batwoman” for her years investigating caves in search of new bat viruses. The second phase began shortly after, with another $3.7 million. Unlike the first, this project appears to have included work on “gain-of-function”: research that investigates how a virus can gain the ability to infect a new type of animal.
...

Was this an elaborate sting operation to set up China to take the fall?

The Covid BioWeapon: Made in the USA, Aimed at China
...
"Given our ongoing military and geopolitical confrontation with China, America seems the likely source of the attack… The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment, probably some of the Deep State Neocons whom Trump had placed near the top of his administration.

This small handful of high-level plotters would have then drawn upon the resources of the American national security apparatus to actually carry out the operation. The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives or members of special forces would have been sent to Wuhan to release it…. In effect, what happened was a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario, but brought to real life.”
...