What is the connection between the origins of COVID (and other diseases) and the intelligence community? From Spartacus at iceni.substack.com:
If the virus came from a lab, then what?
Loose Ends
Emily Kopp at U.S. Right to Know posted an article recently, regarding new FOIA disclosures unearthed from the USGS regarding EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal.
For those still unaware, back in 2018, EcoHealth Alliance made a grant proposal to DARPA for their PREEMPT program, named DEFUSE. This has been covered extensively both by DRASTIC Research, who initially received and analyzed the leaked documents, and Project Veritas, who also received these documents and provided their own take on the matter.
To summarize, DARPA had a program called PREEMPT, short for PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats, with the stated goal of addressing zoonotic viruses and preventing their spillover to humans (specifically, to US troops deployed overseas) by tackling them directly in animal populations.
United States military forces deploy to remote locations around the world, often in areas where emerging infectious diseases are common. The PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program seeks to preserve military readiness by protecting against the infectious disease threat; however, rather than treating people, PREEMPT targets viral pathogens within the animal reservoirs and insect vectors where many diseases originate before they spill over into humans. The program combines biosurveillance and modeling with novel technologies for treating or containing high-risk pathogens at their source to prevent the emergence and reemergence of human-pathogenic threats.
Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance proposed to DARPA to undertake a project for the PREEMPT program called DEFUSE, to reduce the threat of bat SARS to US soldiers. Their proposal was to, and I quote, “Inoculate bats with novel chimeric polyvalent recombinant Spike proteins” in order to boost their immunity against human-adapted SARS. To do this, they intended to synthesize human-adapted Spike and place it in a SARSr-CoV backbone, which they argued would not constitute GOF/DURC research because of their use of SARS-related coronavirus backbones (such as SHC014) instead of the actual SARS-CoV itself.
