The reader who follows the unraveling of the Covid-19 origins coverup may be aware that I observed the DEFUSE proposal while a military fellow at DARPA and reported it to investigating authorities. Time and FOIA records have publicly revealed why the DEFUSE documents were placed where I observed them. Time and FOIA records, however, have not revealed why DEFUSE went unreported to investigators before I did so in 2021.
DEFUSE, Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses, was an EcoHealth Alliance submission to DARPA’s Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program call for proposals. DEFUSE involved American, foreign, and Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists proposing to modify the spike proteins of SARS-related coronaviruses in order to model the probability of disease jump to and spread amongst US Pacific forces. In between was high-risk, arguably gain-of-function dual-use research of concern related to vaccine vector and dispersal development. The exactness of the proposed research to SARS-CoV-2’s features makes DEFUSE a leading hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2’s origin.
DEFUSE was pitched to DARPA in March 2018. Fifteen government agencies saw the proposal in the winter 2018 timeframe. DARPA did not select, though features of the proposal mirror features of future NIH grants. Most importantly, no one who knew of DEFUSE mentioned DEFUSE to authorities or to the public once the pandemic began. DEFUSE was ultimately publicized by DRASTIC, whom I shared it with, in September 2021. With publication, the question emerged as to why the DEFUSE files remained unreported since SARS-CoV-2 emerged, which was one of my questions in my memo to the DOD Office of the Inspector General (DODOIG) (a memo later leaked to Project Veritas).
I FOIA’d the DODOIG for records associated with my case (after being told by Senate staff that the investigation was complete). Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) publicized previous records in November 2024 in his demand that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) investigate the origins coverup within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Intelligence Community (IC). These records reveal that DARPA staff uploaded DEFUSE to the top-secret network in response to an IC call for information. They also reveal that 1) no one who knew of DEFUSE reported its existence since the time SARS-CoV-2 emerged – about 1.5 years and 2) the DODOIG investigating officer did not investigate why no one who knew of DEFUSE reported its existence for 1.5 years.
I recently received the last of the records FOIA’d from DOD. [The latest FOIA records publicly confirm the July 2021 call for information was specific to DEFUSE.]. DODOIG pushed part of the investigation to Defense Health Agency (DHA), but DHA declined to investigate. The rationale is redacted. It’s also unclear why it took multiple years to receive the one-page email that says this.
I will credit DODOIG for pushing an investigation request to DHA. In doing so, there was an implied acknowledgment to my point that the biology of SARS-CoV-2 needed to be reassessed in lieu of the DEFUSE research. Despite public demand to do so, there has still been no assessment in this vein and it remains unclear if the FBI and IC investigations will do so, though the possible engineering in the spike protein and its purpose is the heart of the matter for the illness and for the vaccine injuries.
DODOIG’s records include the interview summaries that were part of the investigating officer’s report (not included in the prior records distribution). The content is bland but there are comments and there are omissions that are the purpose of this essay. These reveal further moral failure tied to withholding the DEFUSE information that contributed to the underinformed and fouled SARS-CoV-2 response, a debacle instigated by the cover-up of SARS-CoV-2’s origin. Fundamentally, the question remains as to why the DEFUSE proposal went unreported for 1.5 years.
The implied reason is that the “source-selection sensitive” files were part of an official program pitch that procedurally remains in a secure folder until the program completes. This is the policy and it is done for legal reasons. DEFUSE is not to be shared because to do so would violate policy. However, when asked for, DEFUSE can be shared, though the chain of command must approve, which is the policy. There is to be no initiative when abiding by policy, even when people are dying.
Following policy was not the morally correct choice. Abiding by procedure is irrelevant to the matter when the issue at hand is treatment for those who are sick, an action that carries moral obligation. Moral obligation manifested the moment the first person was sick from Covid, voiding the ethics of following policy. Arguably, it manifested the moment SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the lab, and further, that moment when man physically manifested a living thing that would harm humans (the input of which may have been the DEFUSE research). Withholding of information related to that thing that was harming humans for policy reasons violated this moral obligation. It was an immoral act.
In contrast to those inclined to abide by policy in the face of moral obligation, how interesting then the moral dilemma of the military officer who can be charged and court-martialed for inaction were the seas to shift and the population demand vengeance for mass damage. It may stun some, but had I known of DEFUSE and withheld its existence, or had I discovered DEFUSE but not reported it, I could be convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer for moral failure regardless of whether I appropriately followed policy. Unsurprisingly, the other officers who assisted felt the same, as no one hesitated to assist in rectifying years of infidelity.
And in contrast to the inaction of many who knew, many others saw immediately the implications of the matter, like the federal agents who repelled those who wanted to prosecute me for revealing DEFUSE, or those in the OIG who told me I was subject to reprisal investigations even though they were not supposed to do so (this gave me the case numbers, which I FOIA’d, and then provided the records to Senate investigators as evidence for the internal IC investigation into the coverup of Covid origins).
Further, by this logic, we will teach the children: “a million people dead, every social bond shredded, the First Amendment abandoned, and millions more harmed when we errantly copied the problem in the “solution” but…we followed policy so we’re good.” This will make no sense to the child. The child we teach not to lie precisely because lies snowball into catastrophe. The child we teach inherits a moral country but who instead sees that as propaganda amidst glaring untruths. And the child we teach inhabits a supposedly great land but instead inherits a place deep with moral injury (accompanied by visible, but unacknowledged, physical wounds). This is not the right answer. No parent in this country wants to teach the children this.
There is the retort that they did what they were asked and processed the files to the intelligence community point of contact. This is correct. But the FBI did not get the files until I directly provided them three months later, despite reportedly being the ones who asked for them (nor, for that matter, did the House, the Senate, HHS OIG, or DODOIG investigators). Somewhere in between is another immoral act, either by omission, negligence, or deliberate malfeasance.
Another moral note: the citizen may or may not find it stunning how many federal agents said NOT to bring the DEFUSE files in the front door to the FBI, only to be corroborated again by the agents I physically met with. Why this was said should probably be examined, though the answer is obvious to those who lived through the time.
(For history’s sake, I leveraged a network of veterans inside the agencies to get the files to the FBI Covid origins team. Why this had to be the method should probably be examined, though the answer is obvious to those who lived through the time. And for history’s sake, when they build the monuments, there will need to be one for all the nameless individual patriots who performed the minute acts of heroism that accumulated into the overthrow of the coverup. Sending emails, holding files, and making copies do not seem like heroics, but each and every act mattered to the outcome.)
The next retort is: why does DEFUSE matter? DEFUSE indicates intent. More than likely the work was already done as much research is done prior to proposal submission to improve chances of winning the funds. But even with intent it reveals the biological manipulation that may have become SARS-CoV-2 – the thing that is causing the problem (the problem being that some people get sick from it – not “the spread” as was errantly framed by the authorities). Knowing what SARS-CoV-2 is informs the assessment of its pathology. An informed assessment of the pathology further informs the treatment for the sick. It also informs the selection of the solution. Herein the operational need for victory weds with moral obligation.
Victory is the national objective. It is also the moral obligation of the commander who puts American citizen-soldiers into harm’s way. We teach this from the first moment of officer school. We teach the SNCOs and NCOs to demand this moral obligation of their officers. This is why officers spend years at a time in school learning to plan. This is why we fire, charge, and court-martial officers who negligently fail to plan operations that rush into unnecessary casualties. This is why we make trainee lieutenants write their combat orders absent sleep in the middle of the night with red light in the prone under their tarp while being hit with CS gas. The expectation is not operational perfection. The expectation is moral rightness. The diligence was done to meet the moral obligation.
The reader may recall being “at war” with the virus. This was the language and actions of the state and dominant social caste. War means moral obligation to win. How can one win if one’s own side withholds information critical to understand the pathology of the problem? “Oh we have the enemy’s war plans but we can’t share them with you because that would violate policy – they’re ‘source-selection sensitive’” is essentially the equivalent of what happened.
In war, true war, real war against other human beings, every activity carries moral weight. There is a plan-to-plan to ensure that we actually plan within the operational time constraints. Concurrent to planning there are the pre-combat checks and inspections, which are to be supervised to ensure perfection. Actions in the assembly area are to be disciplined to not waste precious time and to ensure equipment distribution is perfect to achieve the mission. Movement to the attack position must be disciplined to avoid detection. Maneuver from the attack position must be synchronized and actions on the objective coordinated to not waste materiel and to not waste men from lack of synchronized effects.
On the objective the melee must be won but the melee cannot devolve into inhumane slaughter. And after gains must be consolidated, rounds counted, casualties triaged, status known – there is no rest – and defenses set for the counterattack. The leader who fails to carry the moral weight fails his moral obligation.
In pretend war, performative war against a virus, every activity carries moral weight. Every exposure, every infection, every person who actually got sick, every person told to wait until his lips turned blue before going to the hospital, every person waiting to be triaged because that was the actual capacity issue in the hospitals because the doctors were not told what SARS-CoV-2 was by their government even though their government may have made it, every true hospitalization, every hospitalization of someone dying of something else but infected with Covid making the diagnosis worse, every treatment protocol, every treatment protocol denied because of social and pharmaceutical politics, every actual Covid death, every death with no family members present because family members were not allowed, every action carried moral weight.
The Covid War was a total war. The government, the public health authorities, the media, the propaganda – told us so, as did the moral busybodies who enforced it in every interaction. Every man, woman, child, toddler, and baby was conscripted in the total war. In pretend total war, performative total war against a virus, every activity carried moral weight. Every mother and grandmother gouging her eyes out trying to help a kindergartener do kindergarten by computer, every teacher watching her students not pay attention on the computer for multiple years, every teacher masking the toddlers without the parents’ permission, every toddler delayed in speech because he did not see human faces when he’s supposed to learn to speak, every baby in surgery who wakes to a sea of masks screaming in terror, every mother who holds that baby and never recovers from the sense of her child’s fear, every mother forced to birth absurdly with a facemask on, every couple who happily held their newborn amidst such madness, every couple separated from child a moment later because hospital policy said fathers were visitors after birth and visitors were not allowed to “prevent the spread,” every marriage split by the war’s policies, every family that has not recovered its bonds, every vax-disabled breadwinner whose family collapsed because he cannot provide, every scarred heart, every myocarditis, every pericarditis, every Guillain-Barre, every broken bicuspid valve, every screaming nerve in the bodies of the vax-injured whose nerves are on perpetual fire, every doctor perplexed by perpetual blood clots in perfectly healthy military men, every miscarriage from the spike, every miscarriage of justice when society was force-mandated that their body be a spike protein factory, every drop of mRNA that went beyond “just the shoulder,” every drop of mRNA in the bloodstream, every mRNA in the heart, every mRNA in the spleen, every mRNA in the ovary, every mRNA in the placenta, every mRNA criminally in the placenta of unvaccinated mothers, every mRNA “temporarily” still in bodies years later, every immune cell killing every transfected cell and causing autoimmunity, every piece of propaganda, every false study, every 3am phone conference, every withholding of information because it was source-selection sensitive, every withholding of information because US-funded research contributed to the problem, every human interaction for multiple years a civil war battle.
The Covid war was a total war. Every citizen is involved in total war and every human activity in total war supports the total war. Therefore every human interaction carried moral obligation. But every moral obligation was clouded with untruth due to the coverup. Every moral obligation of the “Covid War” was infected with lies.
The consequence was a pandemic response that was not real. It was not aligned to the threat because the threat was undefined, and remains undefined six years later. The threat is undefined because there is a coverup of US research activity so knowledge of the threat is withheld from the American people, even those who are dying and those who are desperately treating those who are dying. The actions taken therefore are performative. They are “going through the motions;” they have no real effect on the outcome of events. The moral obligation, the actual true moral obligation to every human being involved, which was every man, woman, and child because it was a total war, was not upheld.
Every teenage athlete knows what “going through the motions” is. This is yet another life lesson we teach our children. Irate coaches and lots and lots of windsprints typically follow doing so. The military officer who does so is annihilated.
Speaking of the military officer, what is his duty when he realizes society and government’s response – its problem solving – is performative? It is his job responsibility at DARPA to know the threat intelligence to inform the technology programs (called “snooping” by an interviewee in the FOIA’d files), especially when America is supposedly at war, even performative war. This is a rhetorical question. His duty is to perform the moral act and correct the matter. It is a blight to the American story that others who knew of the proposed DEFUSE research did not attempt to do so far sooner.
Twenty-four years ago sitting in an awards banquet for Presidential Classroom I watched a German teenager weep through her speech over the immorality of her grandparents. That wasn’t the point but that is what came out. She had inherited shame and it spilled out in the moment she and her country were recognized.
This memory returns to me frequently when I encounter excuses for the coverup. The excuses are near-term, naturally, and fail to project the long-term social and moral ramifications that will result. People in an earlier era also once said that they were just following policy.
In our own time, the SARS-CoV-2 origin lies, the coverup, the obvious desire of the over class to avoid the Covid response debacle with no accountability, the adults today who keep the stain internal and unspoken, the children who ask questions about what happened but are rebuffed by remorseful parents, the children who ask questions about what happened and are still told answers different than what their eyes observe, the parents who cannot provide answers because they don’t have them because the truths were withheld, all now set in motion that future moment when an American girl spills out her shame.
From the minutest act of information withholding to the fouled national-level problem solving, the moral infidelities of the SARS-CoV-2 coverup have not yet been addressed.
Join the conversation:
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.
