New Clarity on the Creation of the Virus/Vaccine

Disclaimer: If COVID-19 were linked to animal vaccine research, it would be an unintended consequence, but the creation and cover-up were deliberate.

Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance of its citizens. Daniel Ellsberg exposed government lies. US Marine Major Joseph Murphy exposed something larger: the biodefense blueprint behind a pandemic that killed millions. Snowden’s leak sparked a worldwide debate about privacy. Murphy’s leak — the DARPA DEFUSE proposal — should have sparked a global reckoning about the real origins of SARS-CoV-2.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) serves as a venture capital arm of the world’s largest bureaucracy: the Department of Defense. It funds high-risk academic research to protect US troops from future threats. 

One team proposed modifying bat coronaviruses to spread more effectively—not among humans, but mammalian bats. Testing would occur in Wuhan, where the right bat colonies existed. This was not a fringe idea. It was a biodefense concept encouraged by DARPA under the first Trump administration.

Taken together, the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, plus FOIA documents, emails, and peer-reviewed papers, support Murphy’s hypothesis: SARS-CoV-2 was created in US labs but tested in Wuhan, where it accidentally leaked. This theory has since been debated in the scientific literature, including Nature.

The U.S. intelligence community did not miss this. It moved the unclassified 2018 DARPA project, advertised on Twitter, into a classified 2021 folder.

The 2018 Blueprint

The very agencies that claimed to be searching for answers had the facts all along, stored in a top-secret folder. They knew that Peter Daszak (EcoHealth), Zhengli Shi (WIV), Linfa Wang (Duke), and Ralph Baric (UNC) had proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and testing them on Chinese bats in Wuhan.

Snowden took on the NSA. His leaks revealed that US intelligence treated global pandemics as surveillance targets, explicitly searching for “SARS in China.” Murphy confronted something far more entrenched: what he called the “biodefense oligarchy,” a network spanning DARPA, intelligence agencies, academia, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

January 10, 2020: An Honorable Resignation

One node of that system was already in Wuhan. A NIAID-linked contractor, Danielle Anderson, was stationed at the maximum-security BSL4 lab. She previously told Bloomberg she worked on Ebola, but her name appears alongside Baric’s in the classified DEFUSE files.

Her Duke supervisor, Linfa Wang, resigned on January 10, 2020—the same day the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Wang identified Baric as its author.

After Zhengli Shi published the closest known bat sample, RaTG13, she told the New York Times that “my” lab was not involved in gain-of-function research and that “I” did nothing wrong, so “I” had nothing to fear.

Privately, Baric warned UNC colleagues that Shi could be “arrested” for releasing the embargoed sequence. RaTG13 highlighted what made SARS-CoV-2 unique: the furin cleavage site (PRRAR), which Baric would “introduce” in DEFUSE documents.

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (RaTG13)

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (SARS2)

RaTG13 mattered not because it was closest, but because it exposed what Baric proposed to add. Notice the PRRAR insertion, which Baric referenced in 2019. He would even “provide” his novel genomes to Wang and Shi “for immune boosting of bats.”

Why Wuhan Made Sense

During World War II, Wuhan was occupied by the Japanese. In 1944, the US firebombed Wuhan, dropping 500 tons of incendiaries and killing 20,000 civilians. Seventy-five years later, the US would return to Wuhan, but not with bombs, with bat vaccines.

The city was rebuilt into a modern research hub. During the debate over the Wuhan wet market, one question lingered: why Wuhan? In 2017, DARPA’s program manager Jim Gimlett told Daszak he wanted to vaccinate Chinese bats against SARS-like viruses. Daszak responded, “Interesting idea.” 

Daszak and Shi even visited Gimlett at DARPA headquarters in Washington, DC. They invited Baric to join their team, who called it a “marvelous opportunity.”

While drafting DEFUSE in 2018, Baric wrote, “I have no bat colony, no way for me to do the experiment, which I definitely think needs to be done, or we have no credibility. My understanding [is] another bat colony exists in China.”

Unlike most R&D projects, which can be tested in US labs, Baric’s biotechnology had to be tested in Chinese labs. His biotech is so advanced that it can be shipped worldwide in 1-mL tubes packed on dry ice.

Daszak later admitted that Danielle Anderson was working with Chinese bats in the Wuhan BSL4. Weibo social media posts indicate the BSL4 dormitory was an early transmission hotspot. Notably, Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan was arrested for videotaping the remote BSL4 facility, not Shi’s downtown BSL2 lab.

The Genome Matched the Proposal

In addition to the “peculiar” furin cleavage site, more evidence emerged. In March 2020, US government biodefense officials asked Baric in the Red Dawn emails whether SARS-CoV-2 contained “any restriction sites.” He replied, “No, there is absolutely no evidence of genetic engineering.”

In June 2020, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is like the CIA but for the Pentagon, analyzed the genome. They identified five restriction sites, yielding six pieces, but labeled the DIA report “secret.”

In DEFUSE, Baric proposed dividing the genome into six pieces to simplify manipulation. He later testified, “We think our [UNC] approach is safer [than the WIV] because we’ve divided the genome into six pieces.”

Murphy’s Conclusion

In August 2021, Murphy wrote to the DoD Inspector General:

“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine or its precursor virus.” 

This was an unintended consequence of good intentions. The genome was engineered to resemble a natural Chinese bat virus. Why? To better infect Chinese bats. If Baric’s synthetic genome leaked from a Wuhan lab, it would appear to originate from a Wuhan wet market. 

After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Baric misled the FBI; UNC is facing ongoing lawsuits from U.S. Right to Know; and Baric has been forced to resign.

Following the Money

When the New York Times reported on DEFUSE, it claimed the project “was never funded by the United States,” implying Chinese funding. Yet the proposal invokes the American “warfighter.” Unless China is now a Pentagon ally, the funding logic points back to US agencies.

Murphy attached the unfunded $14 million DARPA DEFUSE proposal to “inoculate” Chinese bats and added:

“As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the proposal. The work took place at the WIV and several U.S. sites, which are identified in detail in the proposal.”

When confronted about DEFUSE funding, Fauci issued a narrowly worded denial: “We have never seen that (DEFUSE) grant, and we have never funded that grant.” The emphasis mattered. Partial funding through revised or renamed proposals remained an option.

After 9/11, Fauci’s biodefense portfolio at NIAID rivaled DARPA’s annual budget. In 2021, The Intercept sued NIAID to obtain two 2019 grants to EcoHealth:

• $3.2 million “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant
• $7.5 million “Zoonotic Virus Emergence” grant

Those two grants, plus a later $3 million Laos grant, totaled the same $14 million budget as DEFUSE. Personnel, experiments, and even the language were recycled. DEFUSE was not rejected. It was rerouted through NIAID under different grant names. When asked directly, Daszak, Baric, and Fauci never denied this.

All were also asked to deny that a novel genome listed in 2019 NIAID documents, called HKU3r-CoVs, could be SARS-CoV-2. Baric described his “chimeric spike” as an unnatural combination of genomes from China and Southeast Asia, differing by 25% from SARS-CoV-1. SARS-CoV-2’s spike differs by the same margin.

Only after The Intercept exposed the NIAID grants did Murphy come forward. He stated what the bureaucracy would not: NIAID funded DEFUSE in practice, if not in name. Lab-leak researchers, known as DRASTIC, later confirmed this in Daszak’s emails marked “not to be shared with Congress.”

The Republican-led Congressional committee concluded that the US funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV. But Shi was paid to ship samples (such as RaTG13) to Baric, who could modify Chinese pathogens into live-attenuated vaccines. The dangerous gain-of-function research took place in North Carolina and Montana, not in Wuhan.

From North Carolina to Montana

Murphy’s hypothesis was not a bioweapon, but an animal vaccine. He identified Baric’s research on attenuated or weakened viruses, but made one error:

“It is likely a live vaccine that has not yet been engineered to a more attenuated state than the program sought to create with its final version. It leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves, but it was not ready to infect bats yet, so it does not appear to infect bats.”

Scientists have not identified a reservoir host in the Wuhan wet market; however, SARS-CoV-2 infects and transmits among American lab bats. The reservoir host is the Egyptian fruit bat, an American surrogate for developing global bat vaccines.

This is where the Wuhan narrative collapses. Egyptian fruit bats do not live in China. They are housed at Fauci’s “satellite campus” in Montana, called Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML), an original DEFUSE vendor. Vincent Munster, who would later be arrested for monkeypox smuggling, ran the Egyptian fruit bat colony at RML and controlled the samples shipped to Wuhan. Brownstone asked, Is this the man who created COVID-19 in Fauci’s lab? Yes, it is!

We know the above details only because Murphy told us where to look. Fauci later funded a Chinese (Rhinolophus) bat-breeding facility in America so they wouldn’t have to test in China.

The Congressional committee interviewed everyone except Murphy, who wasn’t mentioned in their 557-page report. Murphy added:

“The asymptomatic nature is also explained by the bat vaccine’s creators’ intention (a good vaccine does not generate symptoms).”

Designed to Spread

What many assumed was a Chinese bioweapon, owing to Covid’s asymptomatic spread, appeared to be an academic creation. Self-spreading vaccines “evade the immune response” because any “pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow vaccine spread.” Gimlett testified that “self-disseminating vaccines” were under DARPA consideration.

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield echoed a similar theory, calling Baric the “scientific mastermind” while citing aerosolization and immune evasion. But Redfield, like Murphy, claimed SARS-CoV-2 does not infect bats.

In COVID-19 Mystery Solved, the CDC’s Atlanta bat lab confirmed that Egyptian fruit bats are a “non-natural” reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2. These bats are housed in only one other BSL4 facility: Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana.

Fauci called this: Dual-Use Research of Concern. What appeared to be a Chinese virus was actually a contagious animal vaccine, designed to mimic a natural virus and created by a military-academic complex of scientists.

The Military Connection

Covid was not a Chinese creation. It was the culmination of a decades-long US biodefense effort that began after SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, when US military bases in Asia were quarantined. In the DEFUSE draft, Baric noted that tens of thousands of US troops were deployed across East Asia.

Since SARS-CoV-1 emerged from Chinese horseshoe bats in 2003, the US government has funded several projects in the area. The US military even collected the closest progenitor to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic.

During World War II, the Pentagon developed Project X-Ray: bat bombs armed with napalm, designed to exploit bats’ roosting behavior to ignite enemy cities. Eighty years later, DARPA scientists revived the same principle—not as a weapon, but as a delivery system for self-spreading vaccines.

If you were infected with Covid, your body has antibodies to a bat virus collected by a Pentagon agency in Laos in 2017. Can you spot the difference?

LTPTWRVYSTGSNVFQTRAGCLIGAEHVNNSYECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNNSIAIPTNFTISVTTEILPVSMTKTSVDCTMYICGDSTECSNLLLQYGSFCTQLNRALTGIAVEQDKNTQEVFAQVKQIYKTPPIKDFGGFNFSQILPDPSKPSKRSFIEDLLFNKVTLADAGFIKQYGDCLGDIAARDLICAQKFNGLTVLPPLLTDEMIAQYTSALLAGTITSGWTFGAGAALQIPFAMQMAYRFNGIGVTQNVLYENQKLIANQFNSAIGKIQDSLSSTASALGKLQNVVNQNAQALNTLVKQLSSNFGAIS (RaTG13 & Laos Banal-52 collected pre-pandemic)

LTPTWRVYSTGSNVFQTRAGCLIGAEHVNNSYECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNNSIAIPTNFTISVTTEILPVSMTKTSVDCTMYICGDSTECSNLLLQYGSFCTQLNRALTGIAVEQDKNTQEVFAQVKQIYKTPPIKDFGGFNFSQILPDPSKPSKRSFIEDLLFNKVTLADAGFIKQYGDCLGDIAARDLICAQKFNGLTVLPPLLTDEMIAQYTSALLAGTITSGWTFGAGAALQIPFAMQMAYRFNGIGVTQNVLYENQKLIANQFNSAIGKIQDSLSSTASALGKLQNVVNQNAQALNTLVKQLSSNFGAIS (SARS-CoV-2)

The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (PRRVR, RRAR, RXXR, or intracellular proteases) wasn’t inserted to infect humans; it was inserted to infect bats, whose cells also express furin. To date, no other SARS-like virus has this feature.

The cover-up

In 2024 testimony, Baric admitted the 2018 furin cleavage site idea “was clearly mine,” but said DEFUSE was drafted in response to the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy, which called for a more “active posture” to detect and contain emerging biological threats.

“SARS” was cited in that strategy, issued during the first Trump administration. Recall Trump’s April 2020 press conference, when he canceled the Obama-era grant to Wuhan.

That NIAID grant was renewed in July 2019 during his administration—a $3.2 million investment by Trump in the DARPA DEFUSE project.

DEFUSE was pursued under Trump and buried under Biden. The Pentagon later acknowledged the proposal was moved into a classified system for sharing with intelligence agencies, but not with the public. Murphy added:

“A technological challenge as difficult as inoculating bats in China would be tried at DARPA first. The massive “Manhattan Project”-level of information suppression executed by the government and the Trusted News Initiative indicates that it would be covered up if something bad happened. The lab leak hypothesis and squabbling between Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci indicated that the cover-up was more localized. Further, an actual cover-up would be more disciplined with its paperwork. So, I presumed that unclassified files would be concealed on a higher network and found them where I expected them. I understood what they were and their content, pushed the files off-site, and compiled this [Inspector General] report.”

Murphy’s actions mirror those of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers. Like Ellsberg, Murphy did not seek fame. Murphy’s modesty is buried in a Brownstone footnote, since he “uncovered the possible blueprint for SARS-CoV-2, called Project DEFUSE, while a Marine Corps fellow at DARPA in 2021.”

What Murphy found was extraordinary. A 2018 blueprint described the kind of virus that would later appear in Wuhan—trained for transmission in American bats. Leading virologists have been challenged to disprove this hypothesis. None have.

Snowden showed us the government sees everything. Murphy proved it hides everything. One was prosecuted, but the other was promoted. What happened to Major Murphy? He’s now a Lt. Col. and offered one quote:

To those seeking answers, I offer encouragement. There are good people striving for the truth, working together in and out of government, and they succeed.

To those that withhold, I pray for you. Find the moral courage to come forward. Don’t let a lie be our legacy to posterity.

People will forgive. A commitment to truth is in the heart of this nation.

Semper Fi

Maj. Joseph Murphy, USMC

DARPA program manager Jim Gimlett, who funded the SARS-CoV-2 bat colony at Rocky Mountain Lab, was asked for comment. He declined.

Republished from the author’s Substack