> Would Fauci have even known?

I think yes. Perhaps not upfront, perhaps not in the following days or weeks. But if your organization had funded a laboratory's gain of function research, and that laboratory is suddenly the topic of global speculation for potentially leaking a virus, a virus which is ostensibly a product directly of your funding and became one of the deadliest global pandemics ever... I think it would be hard to not know at some point.