The Project Veritas document dump does not add new text to the DEFUSE story. It merely surrounds it with a more tenuously solid imprint of authenticity, by unearthing a DARPA program document that echos what was already in the previous leak. Tenuous, however, being the key word. These documents probably could have been posted to the server the same way they were accessed - from outside of DARPA, sometime last year.
Both the PREEMPT and DEFUSE documents could still be a plant; the DEFUSE project itself could have been a red herring for a long-ago planned intentional release of a product derived from Ralph Baric’s cDNA-based “SARS Etsy Store;” or it could be the actual origin of the virus. All that has changed since the Veritas release is that we will almost certainly be talking about DEFUSE forever. If DEFUSE was real, it was a bonanza of stupidity. If DEFUSE is just a smoke-screen for the intentional murder of billions, it means the smoke-screen smells like nerd-farts.
Whether myth or reality, a farcical misadventure involving the attempted vaccination and “immune boosting” of roughly every bat in the largest continent on Earth, leading to global disaster, is a new entry into the canon of American Tall Tales: And that’s hilarious.
Peter Daszak was our lumberjack. Strolling into town one day, short on earnings due to a poor tree harvest that year, he noticed a sign:
Wanted:
Project Proposal for eliminating wild circulation of potential zoonotic cross-over viruses (got to protect our boys).
They dream big at DARPA. Like, “figuring out how to make insects carry engineered viruses that put cool genes into crops, because there’s no way that could lead to global population collapse” big.1 So, Science à la Kubrick is the baseline. Daszak was merely going with the flow. The proposal for DEFUSE slots a list of researchers, sites, bat and mouse clip-art, and hypothetical answers to “magic off button” into all the right spots, and slaps a bargain-basement $14 million price tag on the result.
And yet strangely it was rejected, per a DRASTIC summary and the newly-unearthed first page of the rejection letter in the Veritas-posted “Major Murphy’s Report.”
The DRASTIC summary states that DEFUSE set off clear alarms for gain of function and “dual use” - as in potentially weaponizable - research:2
source: “Rejection of DEFUSE Project Proposal,” DRASTIC summary (Project Veritas)
Murphy’s letter asserts the same, in a footnote which misspells the PREEMPT Program Manager’s name:
Dr. James Gimbert [sic], DARPA Program Manager states: "team's approach does potentially involve GoF/DURC research"
And yet only the first page of Gimlett’s rejection is apparently included in the pdf made available by Veritas, and it makes no mention of either concern:
So is the alternate spin on “Gimbert”s rejection offered by Joseph Murphy and DRASTIC - “Gain of Function? Well I never!” - really plausible? After all, this is the agency that wants to figure out how to make insects give your crops viruses.3
Here, again, the spectre is raised that the DEFUSE proposal was designed from the start as a smoke-screen, and that the project never actually took place. The apparent (for now) need to retroactively plant the scare-words “Gain of Function” on the project certainly does nothing to purge the whole thing of the odor of a psy-op. It seems designed as fodder for “the opposition,” a lightning-rod to distract from The Big I-word.4
Regardless, our Tall Tale moves on: In the end, Daszak and “DEFUSE the EcoHealth ox” won NIH/NIAID funding from an obscure government official, as Murphy asserts “is known.” Or is it? And despite yesterday’s dump, is there any more evidence beyond the pdf proposal that DEFUSE was actually carried out? (I’m genuinely unclear on this point, so please send comments if there is.) Does the disclosed NIH/NIAID funding extend beyond EcoHealth’s meager grant for the more down-to-earth “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” program, which sparked a somewhat overblown controversy in October when it was revealed that an observation of increased virulence in mice went, gasp, unreported?5
Moreover, given that EcoHealth’s grant for “Understanding” bat coronavirus risks had been active since 2014, it seems plausible that DEFUSE was a simply an earnest money-grab. DARPA put up a wanted post; Daszak saw a chance to milk the agency by parlaying his already-ongoing efforts to understand bat colds into a chance to Protect Our Warfighters. This is what 21st-Century American defense money is for, after all: Technological bridges to nowhere. Flash forward three years, and a concerted effort to pose the paper-trail for Daszak’s abortive DARPA-larping as evidence of a full-blown Gain of Function Manhattan Project crime scene plays out over the course of almost a year: All to distract from the readily-discoverable fact that Baric’s lab at UNC toys with SARS genomes as a hobby.6
Add some Sirotkin-esque scaremongering about an imminent deattenuation event - “look out, you haven’t even seen the real virus!” - another Fauci-vs-early-treatment battle scene, and you’ve succeeded in turning skeptics of the official narrative into a caricature of themselves.7 That seems to be the whole point of the DEFUSE psy-op.
Thankfully, we can assume at this juncture that such a mundane truth, if it is in fact what occurred, will never see the light of day. The Veritas dump, with those subtle little liberties taken with the DARPA rejection text, has cemented the legend, likely for all time. And all I can say is, God bless America!
The 2019 Human-on-Bat Coronavirus Eradication Campaign is now canon. Go ahead and read the tale to your kids:
And so Lumberjack Daszak, who was a pawn, or maybe a double-agent - he wasn’t sure - took Old Man Fauci’s money and paddled across the Pacific Ocean in a canoe. Teaming up with Calamity Shi, they set off on their greatest adventure yet: To defuse the potential for spillover of novel bat-origin high-zoonotic risk SARS-related coronaviruses, by putting a chimeric spike protein onto a SARS backbone, passing it back and forth between mutant mice, and spraying whatever resulted into caves while treating the bats with immune-boosting supplements!
Nor is the reverse easy to accept. So, whereas the DRASTIC summary places the Gain of Function / Dual Use concern at the top of the rejection rationale list, Gimlett begins at the “bottom,” faulting DEFUSE for not being very creative on immunization techniques, and being too vague on program design. But is this plausible, either?
The PREEMPT Announcement posted at Veritas doesn’t seem to demand much rigor on these fronts. The public-facing announcement of the program downplays deployment altogether (emphasis added):
During the planned 3.5-year PREEMPT program, DARPA aims to identify signatures of viral fitness and the potential for spillover from one species to another; develop risk classifiers and predict pathways of viral adaptation; and test initial intervention approaches. By the end of the program, DARPA seeks to demonstrate in controlled laboratory conditions the suppression of viral jump to a new species.
“If we are able to predict how viruses might mutate and spread, and take steps to prevent those mutations from impacting humans, then we’ll vastly diminish the possibility of future viral pandemics,” said Gimlett.
Although PREEMPT is a fundamental research program, DARPA is aware of biosafety and biosecurity sensitivities that could arise. The agency will work with external bioethics advisors to ensure efforts funded by the program adhere to regulations and ethical best practices. Proposers will also be required to address potential ethical, legal, and societal implications of the research.
Although PREEMPT pursues technology for eventual deployment, research is performed entirely in controlled laboratory facilities, including planned proof-of-concept demonstrations at the end of the program. If the program is successful, potential future field trials would take place under the auspices of other government stakeholders following all standard protocols for biosafety.
Note that the current version uses the same text but hilariously tags the program with “Covid 19”:
So which is it? Was DEFUSE too vague about field trials? Not vague enough? Does page two of the Gimlett letter reveal specific concerns about testing the virus in humanized mice? Should such a stated concern, if it exists on paper, even be taken as authentic, given the coy and obviously insincere nature of DARPA’s promises to take ethics and biosafety seriously? Or does the very next sentence in page 2 of Gimlett’s rejection read, “But why would DARPA fund research in China?”
NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak stated in a letter that EcoHealth Alliance laid out in a five-year progress report on bat coronavirus research that it was conducted under an NIH grant and that “in this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus.”
“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do," Tabak wrote. “EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”
Previously, we constructed or synthesized full-length infectious clones from several CoVs, including SARS-CoV, HCoV NL63, and HKU3 (BAT-SRBD). In this manuscript, we describe the synthesis and assembly of a full-length molecular clone for MERS-CoV […]
Murphy’s letter conspicuously echoes the Sirotkins in several points, including their brilliant use of a “quasispecies swarm” model for the virus, as well as their insistence that we have so-far only seen the “vaccine” version of SARS-CoV-2.
See: Sirotkin & Sirotkin. “A Grin Without a Cat” (2021, December 3.) Harvard2theBigHouse.
I read the documents yesterday, and this Major Murphy's report especially seems suspect. The release almost too neatly plugs every gap and makes for an explanation that reads like the reveal in film script. But I am also wrong the majority of the time.
I read the documents yesterday, and this Major Murphy's report especially seems suspect. The release almost too neatly plugs every gap and makes for an explanation that reads like the reveal in film script. But I am also wrong the majority of the time.
I can't explain what it means, but "transmissible, recombinant vaccines" sounds like a really bad idea.