Bad enough that Anthony Fauci and other top officials flouted the law by funding gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the COVID bug is believed to have originated.

But their attempt to cover it all up only compounded the horror, making it more difficult for honest researchers to understand the virus’ origins.

Now that it’s all in the open, those officials need to pay.

At a House hearing last week, emails revealed that a key Fauci aide at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. David Morens, used a “secret back channel” to hide evidence that a grantee had funded the dangerous research.

Morens bragged about deleting “smoking gun” messages related to COVID’s origins — in blatant defiance of record-keeping laws and in an attempt to obstruct a House probe — to protect Fauci and other colleagues.

He also used a private email address to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.

In a Sept. 2021 message, Morens noted that he’d “always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly” and he’d “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

In a Feb. 2021 email, he wrote that he “learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d.”

Could evidence of a coverup be more blatant?

A 35-page memo by a House subcommittee majority staff directly accuses Fauci himself of taking part in “in a conspiracy amongst the highest levels” of the agency to “hide” and potentially “destroy official records regarding the origins of COVID-19.”

What were Fauci & Co. trying to hide?

Obviously, that NIH had provided grant money used for highly dangerous lab work, which involves making viruses more contagious to humans to help develop vaccines in advance.

Meaning US taxpayers unwittingly helped pay for the kind of research believed to have led to the germ that killed more than 7 million people across the globe.

It also shut down economies, costing the world trillions; led to school closures that set back educational progress; and took a toll on mental and physical health in fundamental ways not yet fully understood or recognized.

Fauci, his NIH boss Francis Collins and their pals at EcoHealth, which was behind the research, were desperate to keep that secret.

Indeed, the coverup began even before the full-blown pandemic erupted: In February 2020, Fauci and Collins “prompted” a scientific paper meant specifically to “disprove” suspicions that COVID came from that lab.

Fauci then later cited the paper as evidence the lab-leak theory was wrong and pretended he had nothing to do with it.

House Republicans are weighing whether to recommend criminal charges against Morens. Good.

But every one of those top officials involved in the coverup and the funding needs to pay a steep price.