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March 21st, 2020 
Awake Goy 
Originally published on January 30, 2020 at The Last American Vagabond
DARPA recently spent millions on research involving bats and coronaviruses, as well as gene editing “bioweapons” prior to the recent coronavirus outbreak. Now, “strategic allies” of the agency have been chosen to develop a genetic material-based vaccine to halt the potential epidemic.
WASHINGTON D.C. – In recent weeks, concern
over the emergence of a novel coronavirus in China has grown
exponentially as media, experts and government officials around the
world have openly worried that this new disease has the potential to
develop into a global pandemic.
As concerns about the future of the ongoing outbreak have
grown, so too have the number of theories speculating about the
outbreak’s origin, many of which blame a variety of state actors and/or
controversial billionaires. This has inevitably led to efforts to clamp
down on “misinformation” related to the coronavirus outbreak from both
mainstream media outlets and major social media platforms.
However, while many of these theories are clearly
speculative, there is also verifiable evidence regarding the recent
interest of one controversial U.S. government agency in novel
coronaviruses, specifically those transmitted from bats to humans. That
agency, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA),
began spending millions on such research in 2018 and some of those
Pentagon-funded studies were conducted at known U.S. military bioweapons
labs bordering China and resulted in the discovery of dozens of new
coronavirus strains as recently as last April. Furthermore, the ties of
the Pentagon’s main biodefense lab to a virology institute in Wuhan,
China — where the current outbreak is believed to have begun — have been
unreported in English language media thus far.
While it remains entirely unknown as to what caused the
outbreak, the details of DARPA’s and the Pentagon’s recent
experimentation are clearly in the public interest, especially
considering that the very companies recently chosen to develop a vaccine
to combat the coronavirus outbreak are themselves strategic allies of
DARPA. Not only that, but these DARPA-backed companies are developing
controversial DNA and mRNA vaccines for this particular coronavirus
strain, a category of vaccine that has never previously been approved
for human use in the United States.
Yet, as fears of the pandemic potential of coronavirus
grow, these vaccines are set to be rushed to market for public use,
making it important for the public to be aware of DARPA’s recent
experiments on coronaviruses, bats and gene editing technologies and
their broader implications.
Examining the recent Wuhan-Bioweapon narrative
As the coronavirus outbreak has come to dominate headlines
in recent weeks, several media outlets have promoted claims that the
reported epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China was also the site of
laboratories allegedly linked to a Chinese government biowarfare
program.
However, upon further examination of the sourcing for this
serious claim, these supposed links between the outbreak and an alleged
Chinese bioweapons program have come from two highly dubious sources.
For instance, the first outlet to report on this claim was Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government funded media outlet targeting Asian audiences that used to be run covertly by the CIA and named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network.” Though it is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is now managed by the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which
answers directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director
immediately prior to his current post at the head of the State
Department.
In other words, Radio Free Asia and other BBG-managed media outlets are legal outlets for U.S.
government propaganda. Notably, the long-standing ban on the domestic
use of U.S. government propaganda on U.S. citizens was lifted in 2013,
with the official justification of allowing the government to
“effectively communicate in a credible way” and to better combat
“al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence.”
Returning to the subject at hand, Radio Free Asia’s
recent report on the alleged origins of the outbreak being linked to a
Chinese state-linked virology center cited only Ren Ruihong, the former
head of the medical assistance department at the Chinese Red Cross, for
that claim. Ruihong has been cited as an expert in several Radio Free Asia reports on disease outbreaks in China, but has not been cited as an expert by any other English-language media outlet.
Ruihong told Radio Free Asia that:
“It’s a new type of
mutant coronavirus.They haven’t made public the genetic sequence,
because it is highly contagious…Genetic engineering technology has
gotten to such a point now, and Wuhan is home to a viral research center
that is under the aegis of the China Academy of Sciences, which is the
highest level of research facility in China.”
Though Ruihong did not directly say
that the Chinese government was making a bioweapon at the Wuhan
facility, she did imply that genetic experiments at the facility may
have resulted in the creation of this new “mutant coronavirus” at the
center of the outbreak.
With Radio Free Asia and its single source having speculated about Chinese government links to the creation of the new coronavirus, the Washington Times soon took it much farther in a report titled “Virus-hit Wuhan has two laboratories linked to Chinese bio-warfare program.” That article, much like Radio Free Asia’s earlier report, cites a single source for that claim, former Israeli military intelligence biowarfare specialist Dany Shoham.
Yet, upon reading the article, Shoham
does not even directly make the claim cited in the article’s headline,
as he only told the Washington Times that: “Certain laboratories in the [Wuhan] institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment (emphasis added).”
While Shoham’s claims are clearly speculative, it is telling that the Washington Times would bother to cite him at all, especially given the key role he played in promoting false claims that the 2001 Anthrax attacks was the work of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Shoham’s assertions about Iraq’s government and weaponized Anthrax, which were used to bolster the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
have since been proven completely false, as Iraq was found to have
neither the chemical or biological “weapons of mass destruction” that
“experts” like Shoham had claimed.
Beyond Shoham’s own history of making
suspect claims, it is also worth noting that Shoham’s previous
employer, Israeli military intelligence, has a troubling past with
bioweapons. For instance, in the late 1990s, it was reported by several outlets that Israel was in the process of developing a genetic bioweapon that
would target Arabs, specifically Iraqis, but leave Israeli Jews
unaffected.
Given the dubious past of Shoham and the clearly speculative nature of both his claims and those made in the Radio Free Asia report, one passage in the Washington Times article is particularly telling about why these claims have recently surfaced:
“One ominous sign,
said a U.S. official, is that the false rumors since the outbreak began
several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons. That
could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future
charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defense
research laboratories (emphasis added).”
However, as seen in that very
article, accusations that the coronavirus escaped from a
Chinese-state-linked laboratory is hardly a future charge as both the Washington Times and Radio Free Asia have already been making that claim. Instead, what this passage suggests is that the reports in both Radio Free Asia and the Washington Times were responses to the claims circulating within China that the outbreak
is linked to a “U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons.”
Though most English-language media outlets to date have not examined such a possibility, there is considerable supporting evidence that deserves to be examined. For instance, not only was the U.S. military, including its controversial research arm — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), recently funding studies in and near China that discovered new, mutant coronaviruses originating from bats, but the Pentagon also became recently concerned about the potential use of bats as bioweapons.
Bats as bioweapons
As the ongoing coronavirus outbreak
centered in China has spread to other countries and been blamed for a
growing number of deaths, a consensus has emerged that this particular
virus, currently classified as a “novel [i.e. new] coronavirus,” is believed to have originated in bats and was transmitted to humans in Wuhan, China via a seafood market that also traded exotic animals.
So-called “wet” markets, like the one in Wuhan, were previously blamed
for past deadly coronavirus outbreaks in China, such as the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
In addition, one preliminary study on the coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak found that the
receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), is not only the same
as that used by the SARS coronavirus, but that East Asians present a
much higher ratio of lung cells that express that receptor than the
other ethnicities (Caucasian and African-American) included in the
study. However, such findings are preliminary and the sample size is too
small to draw any definitive conclusions from that preliminary data.
Two years ago, media reports began discussing the Pentagon’s sudden concern that bats could be used
as biological weapons, particularly in spreading coronaviruses and other
deadly diseases. The Washington Post asserted that the Pentagon’s interest in investigating the potential
use of bats to spread weaponized and deadly diseases was because of
alleged Russian efforts to do the same. However, those claims regarding
this Russian interest in using bats as bioweapons date back to the 1980s
when the Soviet Union engaged in covert research involving the Marburg
virus, research that did not even involve bats and which ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
Like much of the Pentagon’s controversial research programs, the bats as bioweapons research has been framed as defensive,
despite the fact that no imminent threat involving bat-propagated
bioweapons has been acknowledged. However, independent scientists have
recently accused the Pentagon, particularly its research arm DARPA, of
claiming to be engaged in research it says is “defensive” but is
actually “offensive.”
The most recent example of this involved DARPA’s “Insect Allies” program,
which officially “aims to protect the U.S. agricultural food supply by
delivering protective genes to plants via insects, which are responsible
for the transmission of most plant viruses” and to ensure “food
security in the event of a major threat,” according to both DARPA and media reports.
However, a group of well-respected, independent scientists revealed in a scathing analysis of the program that, far from a “defensive” research project, the
Insect Allies program was aimed at creating and delivering “new class of
biological weapon.” The scientists, writing in the journal Science and led by Richard Guy Reeves, from the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Biology in Germany, warned that DARPA’s program — which
uses insects as the vehicle for as horizontal environmental genetic
alteration agents (HEGAAS) — revealed “an intention to develop a means
of delivery of HEGAAs for offensive purposes (emphasis added).”
Whatever the real motivation behind
the Pentagon’s sudden and recent concern about bats being used as a
vehicle for bioweapons, the U.S. military has spent millions of dollars
over the past several years funding research on bats, the deadly viruses
they can harbor — including coronaviruses — and how those viruses are
transmitted from bats to humans.
For instance, DARPA spent $10 million on one project in 2018 “to unravel the complex causes of bat-borne viruses that have
recently made the jump to humans, causing concern among global health
officials.” Another research project backed by both DARPA and NIH saw researchers at Colorado State University examine the coronavirus
that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in bats and camels
“to understand the role of these hosts in transmitting disease to
humans.” Other U.S. military-funded studies, discussed in detail later
in this report, discovered several new strains of novel coronaviruses
carried by bats, both within China and in countries bordering China.
Many of these recent research projects are related to DARPA’s Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT program,
which was officially announced in April 2018. PREEMPT focuses
specifically on animal reservoirs of disease, specifically bats, and
DARPA even noted in its press release in the program that it “is aware
of biosafety and biosecurity sensitivities that could arise” due to the
nature of the research.
DARPA’s announcement for PREEMPT came
just a few months after the U.S. government decided to controversially
end a moratorium on so-called “gain-of-function” studies involving
dangerous pathogens. VICE News explained “gain-of-function” studies as follows:
“Known as ‘gain-of-function’ studies, this type of research is ostensibly about trying to stay one step ahead of nature. By making super-viruses that are more pathogenic and easily transmissible,
scientists are able to study the way these viruses may evolve and how
genetic changes affect the way a virus interacts with its host. Using
this information, the scientists can try to pre-empt the natural emergence of these traits by developing antiviral
medications that are capable of staving off a pandemic (emphasis
added).”
In addition, while both DARPA’s
PREEMPT program and the Pentagon’s open interest in bats as bioweapons
were announced in 2018, the U.S. military — specifically the Department
of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program — began funding research involving bats and deadly pathogens, including the coronaviruses MERS and SARS, a year prior in 2017. One of those studies focused on “Bat-Borne Zoonotic Disease Emergence in Western Asia” and involved the Lugar Center in Georgia, identified by former Georgian government officials, the Russian government and independent, investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva as a covert U.S. bioweapons lab.
It is also important to point out the
fact that the U.S. military’s key laboratories involving the study of
deadly pathogens, including coronaviruses, Ebola and others, was
suddenly shut down last July after the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) identified major “biosafety lapses” at the facility.
The U.S. Army Medical Research
Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) facility at Fort Detrick,
Maryland — the U.S. military’s lead laboratory for “biological defense”
research since the late 1960s — was forced to halt all research it was conducting with a series of deadly pathogens after the CDC found
that it lacked “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate
wastewater” from its highest-security labs and failure of staff to
follow safety procedures, among other lapses. The facility contains both
level 3 and level 4 biosafety labs. While it is unknown if experiments
involving coronaviruses were ongoing at the time, USAMRIID has recently been involved in research borne out of the Pentagon’s recent concern about the use of bats as bioweapons.
The decision to shut down USAMRIID garnered surprisingly little media coverage, as did the CDC’s surprising decision to allow the troubled facility to “partially resume” research late last November even though the facility was and is still not at “full operational capability.”
The USAMRIID’s problematic record of safety at such facilities is of
particular concern in light of the recent coronavirus outbreak in China.
As this report will soon reveal, this is because USAMRIID has a
decades-old and close partnership with the University of Wuhan’s
Institute of Medical Virology, which is located in the epicenter of the
current outbreak.
The Pentagon in Wuhan?
Beyond the U.S. military’s recent
expenditures on and interest in the use of bats of bioweapons, it is
also worth examining the recent studies the military has funded
regarding bats and “novel coronaviruses,” such as that behind the recent
outbreak, that have taken place within or in close proximity to China.
For instance, one study conducted in Southern China in 2018 resulted in the discovery of 89 new “novel bat coronavirus” strains
that use the same receptor as the coronavirus known as Middle East
Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). That study was jointly funded by the
Chinese government’s Ministry of Science and Technology, USAID — an
organization long alleged to be a front for U.S. intelligence, and the U.S. National Institute of Health — which has collaborated with both the CIA and the Pentagon on infectious disease and bioweapons research.
The authors of the study also
sequenced the complete genomes for two of those strains and also noted
that existing MERS vaccines would be ineffective in targeting these
viruses, leading them to suggest that one should be developed in
advance. This did not occur.
Another U.S. government-funded study
that discovered still more new strains of “novel bat coronavirus” was
published just last year. Titled “Discovery and Characterization of Novel Bat Coronavirus Lineages from Kazakhstan,”
focused on “the bat fauna of central Asia, which link China to eastern
Europe” and the novel bat coronavirus lineages discovered during the
study were found to be “closely related to bat coronaviruses from China,
France, Spain, and South Africa, suggesting that co-circulation of
coronaviruses is common in multiple bat species with overlapping
geographical distributions.” In other words, the coronaviruses
discovered in this study were identified in bat populations that migrate
between China and Kazakhstan, among other countries, and is closely
related to bat coronaviruses in several countries, including China.
The study was entirely funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, specifically the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency (DTRA) as part of a project investigating coronaviruses
similar to MERS, such as the aforementioned 2018 study. Yet, beyond the
funding of this 2019 study, the institutions involved in conducting
this study are also worth noting given their own close ties to the U.S.
military and government.
The study’s authors are affiliated
with either the Kazakhstan-based Research Institute for Biological
Safety Problems and/or Duke University. The Research Institute for
Biological Safety Problems, though officially a part of Kazakhstan’s
National Center for Biotechnology, has received millions from the U.S. government, most of it coming from the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. It is the Kazakhstan government’s official depository of “highly dangerous animal and bird infections, with a collection of
278 pathogenic strains of 46 infectious diseases.” It is part of a network of Pentagon-funded “bioweapons labs” throughout the Central Asian country, which borders both of the U.S.’ top rival states — China and Russia.
Duke University’s involvement with this study is also interesting given that Duke is a key partner of DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program,
which officially aims “to dramatically accelerate discovery,
integration, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing of medical
countermeasures against infectious diseases.” The first step of the
Duke/DARPA program involves the discovery of potentially threatening viruses and “develop[ing] methods to support viral propagation, so that virus can be used for downstream studies.”
Duke University is also jointly partnered with China’s Wuhan University, which is based in the city where the
current coronavirus outbreak began, which resulted in the opening of the
China-based Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in 2018. Notably, China’s
Wuhan University — in addition to its partnership with Duke — also
includes a multi-lab Institute of Medical Virology that has worked
closely with the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious
Diseases since the 1980s, according to its website.
As previously noted, the USAMRIID facility in the U.S. was shut down
last July for failures to abide by biosafety and proper waste disposal
procedures, but was allowed to partially resume some experiments late
last November.
The Pentagon’s Dark History of Germ Warfare
The U.S. military has a troubling
past of having used disease as a weapon during times of war. One example
involved the U.S.’ use of germ warfare during the Korean War, when it targeted both North Korea and China by dropping diseased insects and voles carrying a variety of pathogens —
including bubonic plague and hemorrhagic fever — from planes in the
middle of the night. Despite the mountain of evidence and the testimony
of U.S. soldiers involved in that program, the U.S. government and
military denied the claims and ordered the destruction of relevant
documentation.
In the post World War II era, other
examples of U.S. research aimed at developing biological weapons have
emerged, some of which have recently received media attention. One such
example occurred this past July, when the U.S. House of Representatives demanded information from the U.S. military on its past efforts to weaponize insects and Lyme disease between 1950 and 1975.
The U.S. has claimed that it has not
pursued offensive biological weapons since 1969 and this has been
further supported by the U.S.’ ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which went into effect in 1975. However, there is extensive evidence that the U.S. has continued to covertly research and develop such
weapons in the years since, much of it conducted abroad and outsourced
to private companies, yet still funded by the U.S. military. Several
investigators, including Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, have documented how the U.S. produces deadly viruses, bacteria and other toxins at
facilities outside of the U.S. — many of them in Eastern Europe, Africa
and South Asia — in clear violation of the BWC.
Aside from the military’s own research, the controversial neoconservative think tank, the now defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC), openly promoted the use of a race-specific genetically modified
bioweapon as a “politically useful tool.” In what is arguably the think
tank’s most controversial document, titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” there are a few passages that openly discuss the utility of bioweapons, including the following sentences:
“…combat likely will
take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the
world of microbes…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target”
specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of
terror to a politically useful tool.”
Though numerous members of PNAC were
prominent in the George W. Bush administration, many of its more
controversial members have again risen to political prominence in the
Trump administration.
Several years after “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” was published, the U.S. Air Force published a document entitled “Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens,” which contains the following passage:
“The JASON group,
composed of academic scientists, served as technical advisers to the U.
S. government. Their study generated six broad classes of genetically
engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society. These
include but are not limited to binary biological weapons, designer
genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping
diseases, and designer diseases (emphasis added).”
Concerns about Pentagon experiments with biological weapons have garnered renewed media attention, particularly after it was revealed in 2017 that DARPA was the top funder of the controversial “gene drive” technology, which
has the power to permanently alter the genetics of entire populations
while targeting others for extinction. At least two of DARPA’s studies
using this controversial technology were classified and “focused on the
potential military application of gene drive technology and use of gene
drives in agriculture,” according to media reports.
The revelation came after an
organization called the ETC Group obtained over 1,000 emails on the
military’s interest in the technology as part of a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request. Co-director of the ETC Group Jim Thomas said that this technology may be used as a biological weapon:
“Gene drives are a
powerful and dangerous new technology and potential biological weapons
could have disastrous impacts on peace, food security and the
environment, especially if misused, The fact that gene drive development
is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises
alarming questions about this entire field.”
Though the exact motivation behind
the military’s interest in such technology is unknown, the Pentagon has
been open about the fact that it is devoting much of its resources
towards the containment of what it considers the two greatest threats to U.S. military hegemony: Russia and China. China has been cited as
the greatest threat of the two by several Pentagon officials, including
John Rood, the Pentagon’s top adviser for defense policy, who described China as the greatest threat to “our way of life in the United States” at the Aspen Security Forum last July.
Since the Pentagon began “redesigning” its policies and research towards a “long war” with Russia and China, the Russian military has accused the U.S. military of harvesting DNA from Russians as part of a covert bioweapon program, a charge that the Pentagon has
adamantly denied. Major General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian
military’s radiation, chemical and biological protection unit who made
these claims, also asserted that the U.S. was developing such weapons in
close proximity to Russian and Chinese borders.
China has also accused the U.S. military of harvesting DNA from Chinese citizens with ill intentions, such as when 200,000 Chinese farmers were used in 12 genetic experiments without informed consent. Those experiments had been conducted by Harvard researchers as part of a U.S. government-funded project.
DARPA and its partners chosen to develop coronavirus vaccine
Last Thursday, the Coalition for
Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced that it would fund
three separate programs in order to promote the development of a vaccine
for the new coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak.
CEPI — which describes itself as “a
partnership of public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations
that will finance and co-ordinate the development of vaccines against
high priority public health threats” — was founded in 2017 by the
governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its massive funding and close
connections to public, private and non-profit organizations have
positioned it to be able to finance the rapid creation of vaccines and
widely distribute them.
CEPI’s recent announcement revealed
that it would fund two pharmaceutical companies — Inovio Pharmaceuticals
and Moderna Inc. — as well as Australia’s University of Queensland,
which became a partner of CEPI early last year. Notably, the two pharmaceutical companies
chosen have close ties to and/or strategic partnerships with DARPA and
are developing vaccines that controversially involve genetic material
and/or gene editing. The University of Queensland also has ties to
DARPA, but those ties are not related to the university’s biotechnology
research, but instead engineering and missile development.
For instance, the top funders of Inovio Pharmaceuticals include both DARPA and the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the company has received millions in dollars in grants from DARPA, including a $45 million grant to develop a vaccine for Ebola. Inovio specializes in the creation of
DNA immunotherapies and DNA vaccines, which contain genetically
engineered DNA that causes the cells of the recipient to produce an
antigen and can permanently alter a person’s DNA. Inovio previously
developed a DNA vaccine for the Zika virus, but — to date — no DNA
vaccine has been approved for use in humans in the United States. Inovio
was also recently awarded over $8 million from the U.S. military to develop a small, portable intradermal device
for delivering DNA vaccines jointly developed by Inovio and USAMRIID.
However, the CEPI grant to combat
coronavirus may change that, as it specifically funds Inovio’s efforts
to continue developing its DNA vaccine for the coronavirus that causes
MERS. Inovio’s MERS vaccine program began in 2018 in partnership with CEPI in a deal worth $56 million. The vaccine currently under development uses “Inovio’s DNA Medicines platform to deliver optimized synthetic
antigenic genes into cells, where they are translated into protein
antigens that activate an individual’s immune system” and the program is
partnered with U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases (USAMRIID) and the NIH, among others. That program is currently
undergoing testing in the Middle East.
Inovio’s collaboration with the U.S.
military in regards to DNA vaccines is nothing new, as their past
efforts to develop a DNA vaccine for both Ebola and Marburg virus were
also part of what Inovio’s CEO Dr. Joseph Kim called its “active biodefense program” that has “garnered multiple grants from
the Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA),
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and other
government agencies.”
CEPI’s interest in increasing its
support to this MERS-specific program seems at odds with its claim that
doing so will combat the current coronavirus outbreak, since MERS and
the novel coronavirus in question are not analogous and treatments for
certain coronaviruses have been shown to be ineffective against other strains.
It is also worth noting that Inovio
Pharmaceuticals was the only company selected by CEPI with direct access
to the Chinese pharmaceutical market through its partnership with China’s ApolloBio Corp., which currently has an exclusive license to sell Inovio-made DNA immunotherapy products to Chinese customers.
The second pharmaceutical company
that was selected by CEPI to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus
is Moderna Inc., which will develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus
of concern in collaboration with the U.S. NIH and which will be funded
entirely by CEPI. The vaccine in question, as opposed to Inovio’s DNA
vaccine, will be a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. Though different than a
DNA vaccine, mRNA vaccines still use genetic material “to direct the
body’s cells to produce intracellular, membrane or secreted proteins.”
Moderna’s mRNA treatments, including its mRNA vaccines, were largely developed using a $25 million grant from DARPA and it often touts is strategic alliance with DARPA in press releases. Moderna’s past and ongoing research efforts have included developing mRNA vaccines tailored to an individual’s unique DNA as well
as an unsuccessful effort to create a mRNA vaccine for the Zika Virus,
which was funded by the U.S. government.
Both DNA and mRNA vaccines involve the introduction of foreign and engineered genetic material into a person’s cells and past studies have found that such vaccines “possess significant unpredictability and a number
of inherent harmful potential hazards” and that “there is inadequate
knowledge to define either the probability of unintended events or the
consequences of genetic modifications.” Nonetheless, the climate of fear
surrounding the coronavirus outbreak could be enough for the public and
private sector to develop and distribute such controversial treatments
due to fear about the epidemic potential of the current outbreak.
However, the therapies being
developed by Inovio, Modern and the University of Queensland are in
alignment with DARPA’s objectives regarding gene editing and vaccine
technology. For instance, in 2015, DARPA geneticist Col. Daniel
Wattendorf described how the agency was investigating a “new method of vaccine production [that]
would involve giving the body instructions for making certain
antibodies. Because the body would be its own bioreactor, the vaccine
could be produced much faster than traditional methods and the result
would be a higher level of protection.”
According to media reports on Wattendorf’s statements at the time, the vaccine would be developed as follows:
“Scientists would
harvest viral antibodies from someone who has recovered from a disease
such as flu or Ebola. After testing the antibodies’ ability to
neutralize viruses in a petri dish, they would isolate the most
effective one, determine the genes needed to make that antibody, and
then encode many copies of those genes into a circular snippet of
genetic material — either DNA or RNA, that the person’s body would then
use as a cookbook to assemble the antibody.”
Though Wattendorf asserted that the
effects of those vaccines wouldn’t be permanent, DARPA has since been
promoting permanent gene modifications as a means of protecting U.S.
troops from biological weapons and infectious disease. “Why is DARPA
doing this? [To] protect a soldier on the battlefield from chemical
weapons and biological weapons by controlling their genome — having the
genome produce proteins that would automatically protect the soldier
from the inside out,” then-DARPA director Steve Walker (now with
Lockheed Martin) said this past September of the project, known as “Safe Genes.”
Conclusion
Research conducted by the Pentagon,
and DARPA specifically, has continually raised concerns, not just in the
field of bioweapons and biotechnology, but also in the fields of
nanotechnology, robotics and several others. DARPA, for instance, has
been developing a series of unsettling research projects that ranges
from microchips that can create and delete memories from the human brain to voting machine software that is rife with problems.
Now, as fear regarding the current
coronavirus outbreak begins to peak, companies with direct ties to DARPA
have been tasked with developing its vaccine, the long-term human and
environmental impacts of which are unknown and will remain unknown by
the time the vaccine is expected to go to market in a few weeks time.
Furthermore, DARPA and the Pentagon’s
past history with bioweapons and their more recent experiments on
genetic alteration and extinction technologies as well as bats and
coronaviruses in proximity to China have been largely left out of the
narrative, despite the information being publicly available. Also left
out of the media narrative have been the direct ties of both the
USAMRIID and DARPA-partnered Duke University to the city of Wuhan,
including its Institute of Medical Virology.
Though much about the origins of the
coronavirus outbreak remains unknown, the U.S. military’s ties to the
aforementioned research studies and research institutions are worth
detailing as such research — while justified in the name of “national
security” — has the frightening potential to result in unintended, yet
world-altering consequences. The lack of transparency about this
research, such as DARPA’s decision to classify its controversial genetic
extinction research and the technology’s use as a weapon of war,
compounds these concerns. While it is important to avoid reckless
speculation as much as possible, it is the opinion of this author that
the information in this report is in the public interest and that
readers should use this information to reach their own conclusions about
the topics discussed herein.
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